The Not So Good Place
by Meresger
Summary: Based on the NBC sitcom 'The Good Place', Emma ends up dead and in the wrong place, because, let's face it, even her goodness in the flashback past was retconned last season to make her a selfish idiot who got a woman killed. (There is currently no 'The Good Place' option to select for crossovers.)
1. The Mix-Up

Title: The Not So Good Place

Disclaimer: I don't own _Once Upon A Time_. If I did, Adam  & Eddy would be fired and picking up litter by the side of the highway. I don't own _The Good Place_ , created by Mike Schur.

Summary: Based on the NBC sitcom _The Good Place_ (and in response to a tumblr prompt), Emma ends up dead and in the wrong place, because, let's face it, even her goodness in the flashback past was retconned last season to make her a selfish idiot who got a woman killed. (Swanfire?)

Genre: Humor, parody, romance.

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 **Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fork.**

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The Not So Good Place

CHAPTER ONE

THE MIX-UP

Emma Swan found herself sitting in an office facing a white-haired man in glasses and a bow tie who smiled kindly at her.

"Ah... how did I get here?" Emma asked after the startlement wore off. It wasn't exactly like suddenly being in a new place was unusual for her, but she didn't remember being in any sort of crazy predicament that might result in being magically poofed into a weirdly cheerful office with a very weird portrait of a doofus-looking guy on the wall.

"And... where is here? And who are you?" she concluded while the guy just kept smiling.

"Here is the Afterlife. You, Emma, are dead. I'm Michael, and I'm... well... you're greeter."

"I... I don't remember dying," Emma croaked out. "And I thought King Arthur was in charge of The Underworld?"

Michael groaned a little. "Oh, you know about that. Of course you do. I suppose it's common knowledge in the magical realms. What isn't such common knowledge is that The Underworld is... well... an unsanctioned realm and a bit of an embarrassment. Actually, to be perfectly frank, it's completely forked up."

"Did you just say _forked_?" Emma asked, her brain hurting.

"People in this part of the Afterlife don't like swearing," explained Michael.

"This... part?"

"Yes." He smiled. "You're in The Good Place, Emma."

"The Good... but... I thought everyone went to The Underworld. And then if you redeemed yourself there, Zeus-"

"Oh, don't get me started on Zeus," groaned Michael and he cleaned his glasses in an Archie sort of way.

"He was one of my classmates who flunked out of Architect School," the white-haired man - was he a man? - began explaining anyway. "He stole one of the magic pens and that crystal to make his own Afterlife, you see. Of course, that lazy sonofabench was better suited to designing The Bad Place since he slept with his sister and had a soft spot for rapists, so while The Underworld isn't as bad as The Bad Place, at least The Bad Place has rules."

After a pause, Michael continued, "Of course, Zeus also made his own Good and Bad Place, Elyssium and Tartarus, and he only came up with The Underworld because of a dispute we had over what to do with the Medium People."

"Medium... People?"

"People who are neither saintly nor demonic. Redeemable but, frankly, not the cream of the crop, some not even close," sighed Michael. "Anyway, Zeus quickly figured out what a pain in the ash it is to deal with _those_ sorts, so he put his mentally unstable brother in charge, which just forked things up even more as Hades was especially manic about stealing away souls from the _real_ Good and Bad Place, but since death can be... unwritten in those fake afterlifes, souls were always escaping, either by their own evil cunning like Sisyphus, or idiot living people finding portals to swap living for dead people or plead with Zeus to give them their loved one back.

"And don't get me started on _The River of Lost Souls!_ If you can believe it," Michael scoffed, "some moron took her entire family, including her twelve year old son, to The Underworld to get her deadbeat murderer rapist boyfriend back and while she was at it at least one soul that Hades poached that was supposed to come here ended up sentenced to eternal torment because of her selfish stupidity! If anyone's going to the Bad Place, let me tell you..."

Emma sunk in her chair as her heart sunk somewhere in the vicinity of her stomach. Oh, this was not good. This was not good at all!

"But, of course, you don't need to worry about that!" Michael beamed. "I'm sure you were never tempted by those highly inaccurate to downright insulting portrayals of love and justice proliferated by those so-called Authors that Zeus and Hades employed to get souls by tricking them into confusing lust with love and a forked up sort of charity with justice and thus muddying their karma enough that they wouldn't get a straight shot here. Sadistically clever, really!"

Michael shook his head. "But what was I saying? Oh, yes, you being a savior, with a pure heart and all that, you avoided a lot of the temptations and falsehoods that plague most people in magical worlds under Zeus' thumb and results in so few of your people ending up here."

"Ah... yeah... obviously," Emma croaked out while trying to make sense of what this guy was saying. All that stuff in Henry's books was lies manipulated by some dropout from Heaven so he could steal souls for his own fun and games and play God? She was supposed to be in Hell because she rescued Hook? Then how the _fork_ had she ended up here?

"I'm so excited. You're my first savior! I'm sure you have some amazing stories to tell about your selfless heroics!"

At Emma's anxious look, Michael settled a bit and apologized, "I'm sorry. Where are my manners? Of course, I'm sure you have more questions. This can be overwhelming, even for saviors who more-or-less expect an untimely demise."

Emma winced and asked, "So... I did get stabbed by someone in a cloak?"

Michael flipped open a file on his desk. "Oh, no actually. I know that's the most common way saviors go, but things got a bit muddy after that Jafar fellow altered the rules of magic. Plus some idiot went back in time and created a whole bunch of paradoxes that have been a bench to try and correct. Not to mention making _two_ Dark Ones. Can you imagine? That must have racked up some serious bad karma. Hard to offset _that_."

As Emma sunk lower in her chair, Michael continued, "Let's see... it says here you were leaving a place called... the Dark Star Pharmacy after purchasing a box of Pina Colada Flavored condoms and a bottle of Sexy Girl lube, extra strength variety 'for the extra dry vagina'. You were crossing the street when you were distracted by what you thought was a wolf, but was actually a very large raccoon that had suffered some sort of engorgement spell, and were struck by a panel van being driven by... a drunk dwarf. The magical kind. And thrown about fifty feet down Main Street."

" _Grumpy_ killed me!?" Emma exclaimed.

"No. You actually survived the crash rather amazingly," said Michael. "You used magic to cushion the blow and redirected your momentum. You were just getting up when a piano feel on you."

" _A piano_?"

"Yes. A grand piano. It was pink and glittery, apparently, and fell from about five hundred feet up where it was thrown out of a magical twister that some witch called... Zelena had conjured. It had picked up the piano from The Land of Music and a gay nightclub called The Enchanted Forest, founded by an emigrant from your world.

"Huh... I wonder if Zelena was trying to bring something from the actual Enchanted Forest and botched the spell?

"Anyway, it smooshed you pretty good. Like Loony Tunes smooshed. After the drunk dwarf puked on your boots - the only part sticking out from under the piano - your family showed up and magically removed the wreckage and tried unsuccessfully to revive you. Your boyfriend tried to true love kiss you awake, which is, of course, ridiculous since you weren't cursed, but I suppose he should get some points considering how horrifically mangled your face was. Not to mention you had apparently eaten for lunch something called Granny's Five Bean Stew and... well... it's true what they say about one's bowls when they-"

"I get the picture," grimaced Emma.

"Yes, it's a rather embarrassing way for a savior to go," nodded Michael, "that's why I didn't open with it. So... shall we? I think we just have time to stop by your new house before the Orientation!"

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AN: Like _The Good Place_ , I'm not sure where this is going. Maybe it will follow the show as the season unfolds. Suggestions are welcome.


	2. Orientation

The Not So Good Place

 **Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.**

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CHAPTER TWO

ORIENTATION

The Good Place looked like something out of _Mary Poppins_ or _The Sound of Music_ with perfect grass and flowers and rolling hills, though apparently that was only this part of it.

"...There are 322 people in each neighborhood," Michael told Emma as they walked down a cobblestoned street that had a lot of Frozen Yogurt places for some reason, "each selected to create a blissful harmonic balance. Some are cold, some are hot, more urban, more rural, each suited to the tastes of the people in them."

"Like Middle Mists?" Emma asked, spotting a pink tea-rose-like bloom with chive-like leaves growing up through some cobbles.

Michael went still and paled. "What is _that_ doing here!?" he gasped and stomped on the flower until it was a pulverized mess. "If that's someone's idea of a joke... I tried to upgrade Janet's software to be more... human. Maybe she didn't understand the parameters of what a 'prank' is, because it is _definitely_ not inserting one of those monstrosities into my neighborhood!"

Emma blinked, confused, "Um... monstrosities?"

"Yes, monstrosities!" huffed Michael, trying to calm himself down. "Nimue created them in an attempt to control Merlin's emotions," he explained, walking again and turning toward the residential part of town. "Their pollen is worse than that pixie dust stuff from Neverland. King Arthur was using them to perpetuate the effects of Avalon sand to mind control everyone in Camelot. Plus, they increase hormone levels making people exceedingly horny with severe emotional immaturity and poor judgment. Basically, they turn fully grown adults into pubescent teenagers. And _that_ would definitely mess with the balance here!"

Michael shook his head and straightened his tie. "If only that dumb kid hadn't fixed that quill. If only he'd left it broken and burned all the books. I mean, who makes a twelve year old boy an _Author_? It took me _two hundred years_ to become an Architect. Zeus really should be in The Bad Place, but he's been better at eluding the authorities than El Chappo. Who is definitely going to The Bad Place."

"What about that... ah... Author kid?" asked Emma, feeling nervous. She'd kind of... well... neglected Henry... a bit... maybe, she was starting to realize. "Where is he headed?"

"If he were to die right now?"

"Ah... sure."

"JANET!" Michael called out and suddenly a woman dressed like a flight attendant appeared. "That Author kid. The unlisenced mortal one-"

"Henry Mills."

"Yes, him. If he died right now, where would he go?"

Janet answered immediately, "If he died right now as a mortal soul bound to the Stolen Quill he would go to The Underworld where, if he chose to move on, he would be ferried to The Halls of Justice through Hades' mirage of happiness-"

"That was a prank," Michael cut in for Emma's benefit. "He liked screwing over villains unlike his brother who had a boner for them."

"where," Janet continued, "the Justices of Olympus would weigh his heart and after any pertinent testimony from The Furies on matters of Olympian justice was delivered, the Justices would determine if he went to Elyssium or Tartarus. By the parameters of Olympian Judgment that reviving The Quill would erase having broken it and by the same logic, that his ex-mass murderer and rapist adoptive mother, murderer and former Dark One birth mother, and ex-murder and rapist stepfather that he once denounced but later sought to give them happy endings repented, as well as renouncing his murderer grandfather who had not repented-"

"Yes, yes," Michael cut her off. "Cut to the hypothetical judgment."

"Henry Mills would go to Elyssium."

"And... if he wasn't bound to that quill?" asked Emma.

"Oh, he would go to The Bad Place," stated Janet. "Henry Mills currently has a negative score of twenty thousand seven hundred and thirty six."

"Trying to give happy endings to murderers and rapists with narcissistic personality disorder who have never sought to repair the damage they've done and call themselves heroes rather than getting justice for their victims is very bad karma," Michael explained.

The Architect sighed, pausing in his step as a butterfly flitted in front of them.

"Poor kid, really," he mused. "I mean, he's not Menedez Brothers levels of bad-seed teenager, but he's clearly on the wrong path, brainwashed by the fairy tale stereotypes that Zeus had indoctrinated into those magical worlds he bound to that quill and were disseminated by generations of Authors. Of course, more recently, he had to get Authors from Earth to ensure all those Curse refugees would also end up in The Underworld. Which means poor Henry is a victim of a very evil and cunning plan, of course, but he still has free will and ignorance is not an excuse around here. Good is Good and Evil is Evil. Helping Evil is going to get you on the list for-" he pointed downwards with his thumb.

"Is that all?" asked Janet.

"Oh, yes," nodded Michael. "Thank you, Janet. Would you make sure the town commons is set up for Orientation? It's just a few hours away now! I'm so excited!"

Janet nodded and vanished. Just vanished.

"Um... what is...?"

"Janet?" Michael prompted. "Janet is a celestial guide who acts as the neighborhood... um... what is that communication device with the woman's voice that answers questions?"

"Siri?"

"Right, her. Janet details everything of what goes on in The Good Place but... has some flaws in trying to act more human," Michael admitted. "We're working on this one's programming. It's been hit-and-miss to be honest."

"So... I can ask Janet anything?"

"Anything that's in her databanks," nodded Michael. "I'm sure you'll have some questions for Janet after Orientation, though I hope the video will do a _good_ job of explaining how judgment works _here,_ Emma. The right way. Not how Zeus and his so-called 'gods' do it. I mean, can you imagine if you'd lived your life, a savior, by rules that said the moment you stopped doing bad things, you were a good person? That everything before: murder, rape, theft, etc. were wiped clean from your soul? Or that if you started doing good things for selfish reasons, like charity to get a tax write off or helping rescue someone's child in the hopes of getting them to sleep with you, that your actions made you a hero? Or saying someone was redeemed just because they were your family and you loved them no matter how many people they murdered or raped? I mean, that's absurd!" he laughed.

"Ah... yeah, that makes no sense," Emma forced out while squashing down growing panic. How long before Michael figured out who she was? That she'd apparently lived her life - or the last few years of it - by the wrong rules helping people who'd done very bad things and ignoring the people they did those bad things to, because the bad people were her family?

"I'm glad you get it. Saviors do have that clarity of judgment no matter what world they're from and that's so refreshing," nodded Michael.

"Right. That's me. Clear judgment." Fake laugh. "Speaking of the, ah, savior thing," Emma asked, "If I had a vision of dying the way saviors are supposed to die, then how did I die like this? I mean, I thought I was supposed to die doing something heroic and... savior-y?"

"Well, that's hard to say," shrugged Michael. "Combine that time travel paradox with an altered Dark One and a new pubescent Author who turned two lesbians walking in the forest into hot girl-on-girl action - major negative points, not to mention unpausing those stories, and there was quit a bit forked up with the entertwined fairy tale realms.

"But my best guess is that Zeus had Morpheus send you that vision to mess with you. Morpheus was our class stoner and the real prankster of the bunch, but not the good kind of prankster. Like every century or two Morpheus and this fairy bootycall of his prank some dysfunctional, codependent, frankly just plain wrong, couple by stealing their newborn baby, raising it up to be an assassin in a realm outside of time, and sending them fake dream visions from there to a time before the kid is born to make them hate each other enough that his cohort can steal the kid to kill someone of their choosing just for kicks. Of course they make up some 'reason'," Michael made air quotes, "but it's all nonsensical forkery to tell at Olympian cocktail orgies."

"Yeah, that's... messed up," grimaced Emma. So that whole thing with Gideon and him trying to kill her and her dreams and Belle's dreams weren't just manipulations by Rumplestiltskin's mother or part of savior prophesy... but an orchestrated funny story for some immortal prick to tell at parties!?

They rounded a corner and Michael waved his arms dramatically. "And here we are! Home sweet home!"

Home sweet home was... almost exactly like the house Hook and Henry had picked out for her. Which, to be honest, Emma utterly loathed everything about, but she hadn't been able to bring herself to say so, because it was clearly part of their happy ending.

Emma's mood soured even further after following Michael inside. And not because it was identical to her actual house. Unlike her house in life, which she'd at least been able to decorate herself, this one was filled with horrible country themed stuff like chicken tea cozzies and cow salt and pepper shakers. There was even a corn cob print on the drapes. And the couch was covered in plastic! What kind of crazy savior was this designed for?

"It's just how you like it, down to the velvet Elvis paintings," Michael gestured to hallway devoted to them.

"You can also use the TV to view anything in your life from your point of view," he continued, calling up a Star Trek like TV out of nothing that was showing a video of events Emma had no recollection of.

"When you risked drowning to save that village of lesbian mermaids from being destroyed by those pirates, getting them those bracelets and evacuating them to that island... you got a lot of points for that. Not to mention going back for that disabled mermaid who'd lost her fin in a fishing net accident even though your spell was wearing off. Not many people, even saviors, would do that!"

"Yeah... that was... something," Emma lied while the person who was obviously not her stabbed a pirate who'd been attempting to rape one of the humanized mermaids on some island where a battle was going on.

"I'm sure you have many heroic adventures to reminisce about! All the innocent people you saved from horrible villains. And now you can!"

"Looking forward to it," replied Emma. Really. To try and figure out who the fork Michael thought she was... whose place she had apparently taken.

"Well, I have a few more people to greet," Michael told her. "You'll receive a message when it's time to head to the Orientation. Until then, just relax."

Michael hurried out the door leaving Emma, unnerved, to explore her new house. Her closet was full of white t-shirts, peddle-pushers, and crocks. And even worse, the fridge was full of kale and soy milk! There had obviously been a huge mistake! But how the hell did Michael not know that she was the 'selfish jerk' who went to The Underworld and time traveled, and apparently 'forked up' reality so much she was doomed to The Bad Place?

Not that a place where she had to drink soy milk was a good place!

"Bleh! This stuff tastes horrible!" Emma spit it out. "Where's rum when you need it? Answer that question, Janet."

"There's no rum," a voice startled her. Janet again. "According to your file, you do not drink alcohol. But if you would prefer an alternative to soy milk, we have several varieties of almond milk."

"What, no regular milk?" Emma snorted.

"Well, in life you were lactose intolerant," said Janet. "One glass of milk and you suffered horrible flatulence."

"I did not!"

"According to your file-"

"Enough about my forking file!" Emma huffed, then corrected, "No, wait, actually. What's the basics of my file? No... wait, if you access it do you have to tell Michael?"

"Anything you ask me or that I provide is in the strictest confidence."

"Great, then access away!"

"You are Emma Swan. Born in The Enchanted Forest, a savior of extra ordinary powers due to a spell cast on you before birth that removed your innate darkness. Raised on Earth, sometimes called 'The Land Without Magic' by your people. You had a child out of wedlock at eighteen that you gave up for adoption to 'have his best chance'. Your occupation before coming into your savior duties was a bounty hunter, with your primary focus on apprehending deadbeat men who failed to pay child support. Once reunited with your family and returned to your birthright, you saved many people and magical worlds from terrible villains and other forms of magical destruction."

"No... ah... criminal record?" Emma asked, confused, because that was all accurate.

"You got a traffic ticket in 2013 for out of date registration on out-of-state plates," answered Janet.

"Got a lot of bad points for that, huh?"

"Actually, anything associated with the DMV is ignored. The DMV is the only place worse than The Bad Place."

"I can see that," snorted Emma. "So... do allergies apply in the Afterlife...?"

"They do not. The soy milk was merely meant to provide an atmosphere of familiarity. You are encouraged to try new things. If you would like real mik-"

"Rum. The finest you can conjure up."

"Of course."

Suddenly a bottle of expensive rum and a highball glass appeared on the counter.

"You won't tell... ah... Michael about this?"

"I will not."

"Awesome! So... do I just poof myself back to town in an hour or what?" Emma asked while unscrewing the cap.

"You do not have magical abilities here. All mortal souls are equal here."

Emma tried to magical transfer the rum into a glass, but nothing happened. She scowled. " _Seriously_? What the hell? Magic was the only good part of my savior birthright!"

"Technically, magic was a result of the spell cast on you before birth, not being designated a savior," Janet corrected. "Most people who use magic can only harness magic, but do not themselves contain it. But in those rare cases, it separates from the soul at death, returning to the magical force."

"Accept in The Underworld?"

"Zeus may choose to give souls magical abilities that mirror what they knew in life, but it is not the same magic. It is dark and dangerous and further taints their souls."

"Of course it does," sighed Emma, and she drank straight from the bottle.

* * *

Emma was slightly tipsy as she walked into the town commons which was crowded with exactly 321 other people. There was a big movie screen and it began to play a video featuring Michael...

"Welcome to your first day in the afterlife. You are all good people," said Video Michael. "But how to do we know you were good? How are we sure? During your time on Earth-" 'Good vs. Bad: an explanation' appeared on the screen next to him, "every one of your actions had a positive or a negative value depending on how much good or bad that action put into the universe. Every sandwich you ate-" (+1.04), "every time you bought a magazine" (-0.75).

"Every single thing you did had an effect that rippled out over time and ultimately created some amount of good or bad," Video Michael continued as green and red examples piled up on the white background around him.

Emma found herself focused on the negative ones as Michael went on to use an example about the breakdown lane.

COMMIT GENOCIDE -433700.55

ATTEMPTED NECROMANCY -20900.88

COVER UP MURDER (OF A BLACK MAN AS A WHITE LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER) -3010.70

The list continued, and Emma could find very few green positive actions that applied to her... and a lot of red negative ones that applied to her, Killian, and most of her family, including Henry, her apparently doomed son.

"...there's traffic and they think to themselves 'ah, who cares. No one's watching'? We were watching. Surprise!" Video Michael smuggly stated.

"Anyway, when your life has ended, " he continued, "we calculate the total value of your life using our perfectly accurate measuring system. Only the people with the very highest scores - the true cream of the crop - get to come here, to The Good Place.

"What happens to everyone else, you ask? Don't worry about it. The point is, you are here because you lived one of the very best lives that could be led.

"And, you won't be alone. Your true soulmate is here too. That's right!" Video Michael crowed while others looked around in surprise and Emma with unsettlement. "Soulmates are real. One of the other people in your neighborhood is your actual soulmate and you will spend eternity together.

"So welcome to eternal happiness. Welcome to The Good Place! Sponsored by: otters holding hands while they sleep. You know the feeling you get when you see two otters holding hands? That's how you're gonna feel every day!"

Emma felt her gut twisting into knots as everyone else looked around, trying to find their soulmate. She had found hers in Killian, hadn't she? But he wasn't here, because she wasn't supposed to be here.

"Emma!" Michael called out from the crowd and came over to join her. "Sorry for skipping out like that. I hope Janet was helpful. I know you were lactose intolerant in life, but that doesn't apply here, so how about we grab some frozen yogurt? Humans seem to love it."

"Ah... yeah... sure," Emma agreed and walked with Michael to one of many frozen yogurt shops on Main Street.

After getting their yogurt, they sat down and Michael began, "Now, I bet you're curious about this soulmate of yours. A True Soulmate isn't the same as you were probably taught about soulmates in the magical realms."

"You mean like Snow White and Prince Charming," said Emma.

"Yes exactly!" he nodded. "I mean, sure, it sounds pretty and all in a children's storybook kind of way that Snow White and Prince Charming are soulmates, but soulmates bring out the best in each other. But, honestly, did you know that when they first met, they created a 'true love sapling'," he made air quotes and snorted, "by holding hands over the warm corpse of a man Charming had just murdered? It's no wonder some corporealized split personality phantasm could break that dumb tree like a stale breadstick. True love sapling? Sorry, Zeus, but no matter how hard you try, you can't make real true love magic from a tree growing out of a murdered body, no mater how awful that guy was in life. Two wrongs don't make a right!

"Anyway, those two are a terrible example of true love. Or an accurate example of one of Zeus' many fraudulent uses of it. Soulmates? Perhaps. But then they weren't supposed to meet in life, so having them meet - like with Regina and that Robin Hood character - it just forks everything up!

"True love doesn't encourage or enable each other to curse their unborn child or put darkness into another child or lie about that for decades, trust a shady fairy to send their child alone through a wardrobe to anywhere let alone a completely different world without any sort of way for the child to be taken care of, murder one to cast a Dark Curse and then violate every law of nature to bring that murdered spouse back from the dead which could have resulted in the death of their unborn child that only had to replace the child they didn't get to raise...

"Not to mention I understand they told their grandson's father to go fork himself when he asked for help to find his son and their daughter and then to cover up those actions indirectly leading to his death and to reassert the focus on how good and heroic they are, they named _their_ son after him. And _then_ ," he rolled his eyes,"left their replacement baby alone to help their daughter try to resurrect her murdering rapist boyfriend and told her it wasn't her fault that her step grandmother's lover was killed, even though it was, just because they clearly have forked up morals, and then also when she failed to resurrect the guy gave some hypocritical speech about needing to let go and grieve, the exact opposite of their own selfish stupidity. I understand Snow White also thanked the woman who murdered her father and tired to kill her entire family repeatedly for teaching her what hope is. Of course, I also understand she has sustained more concussions than Junior Seau so her brain is probably turning to mush.

"Anyway, I'm sure if you'd ever met them, you'd agree that they're horribly selfish people who are doing a great disservice to us here and just helping Zeus get souls," said Michael.

"No doubt," sighed Emma. It kind of sounded like her whole family was damned to The Bad Place. So maybe Henry binding their souls to that book wasn't such a bad thing if Zeus had forked up justice that would get off like Cora got off for mass murder and child abuse after hugging it out...

"But where was I? Oh, yes, soulmates," Michael waved that off, "Not all soulmates are romantic. That's another fairytale misconception. It all depends what kind of relationship two people most need to thrive, to reach their full potential. Sometimes it's lovers, sometimes it's friends, or a mentor or parental type relationship. Often the later are even stronger, what with not having sex there to get in the way. Humans are insufferably easily distracted by sex. They mistake it for love _all_ time. Leads to a lot of negative karma."

"Yeah... no... doubt," Emma answered, distracted by a yellow Volkswagen beetle driving past.

"Oh, darn," groaned Michael. "I must have given him the wrong Frozen Yogurt shop."

"You... huh?"

"Your soulmate. That's his car, you see. I said I must have-"

Emma wasn't listening anymore. She got up, yogurt forgotten and ran down the sidewalk, narrowly missing knocking over people as she rounded the corner. The Bug was nowhere... but she knew Neal. And the next ally down, there it sat partially hidden by some dumpsters.

Neal was in the driver's seat when she pulled open the passenger door and got in.

" _You're_ my soulmate?"

* * *

Next up: A conversation in The Bug.


	3. Soulmates

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fuck.**

* * *

CHAPTER THREE

SOULMATES

" _You're_ my soulmate?"

Neal scowled. "Wow, when you say it like that-"

"I didn't mean-"

"Yeah, you did," he cut her off, his expression cool. "And you know what? I get it. I really do. Cause I was stoked about meeting my soulmate until I asked Janet to show me a picture of her and realized someone must have majorly forked up, because there's no way you could be here."

Emma shut the door and sputtered, "What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

"It means that along with being able to view your life," Neal shot back, "you can view your loved ones lives that you left behind. And since I was the first one to show up in this neighborhood, even with the whole time being irrelevant thing so everyone and their soulmate shows up at the same time, besides trying to get you to get your head out of Hook's ash and not drag our kid to Fake Sort of Hell, I did have enough of time to flip through a wonderful clipfest of all the shirt you did, which boils down to being a deadbeat of a mother to the kid you had because all you seemed to think about twenty-four-seven was when and how and where to fork my stepfather and fate willing you wouldn't get impaled by some villain so you could impale yourself on his heroic sword and be an incubator for his babies, because poor widdle Hooky-poo deserves so much happiness!"

"That's not at all how it was!" Emma snapped.

Neal scoffed. "Yeah, you know what, Emma? Fork you. I still loved you, but I was finally gonna get _my_ Tallahassee, only my still loving you got in the way of that, cause I turn on the TV and find out you turned into some lame-ass love-sick Dark One over a guy you just met and barely knew who told you to your face he spent the last three hundred years raping women, had cold-blooded murdered at least five people, and then you helped cover up one of his murders by brainwashing your entire family and breaking Henry's heart before dragging them all to The Underworld to try and split your heart with a rotting corpse, but thanks to Zeus being all happy and shirt that Henry fixed his stolen quill, you got your forkboy back and proceeded to rewrite everything we once had to make your entire existence about some happy ending bullshirt he somehow deserved after giving up his murdering and raping _and handing me over to Pan out of spite because I wasn't cool with him having banged my mom and left me to think she'd been raped to death_ , murdering the most powerful wizard of all time, and trying to kill your entire family, including Henry. But you couldn't forgive me for trusting August or not answering a forking post card?"

Neal scoffed. "Again. Fork you. You betrayed everything I once loved about you for a sociopath and then you died and left our kid with a bunch of forking selfish psychos! I did what I had to do, what I was told was right, to reunite you with your family, and you got it torn apart again, and all to be the trophy wife of some jerk who's harder to kill than a cockroach. Well, good for you, Emma. _Now get the fork outta my car_!"

Emma did. She shut the door and watched Neal speed off, tires squealing. She didn't even realize she was crying until Janet appeared with a box of tissues.

"Can you take me to my ugly-ash home?"

Janet did so, bringing them to the kitchen where Emma immediately poured herself another drink from the bottle.

"I really forked up, Janet," she sniffed. "My kid... he's all alone. I mean, he has my family, but they're kind of idiots and psychos. And I kind of neglected him. A lot. After not even being in his life for ten years. Is it considered bad to move in with your boyfriend who routinely belittles your kid because he probably hates him for being a reminder of your first love?"

"That's a negative two hundred fifty seven point three six points," Janet relayed.

"I'm a horrible person."

"That doesn't quite count as 'horrible'."

"I didn't mention that he'd tried to kill my entire family a few days before that and I started dating him even though he all but outright said he date raped women for _three hundred years_ and I knew he was always trying to get me drunk to sleep with me, and he's murdered at least a half dozen innocent people and helped a horrible woman commit the mass murder of at least two hundred people. And left me and my mom to starve to death. I also kinda got him brought back from the dead. After killing him. After turning him into the Dark One and covering up his murdering Merlin. Who was black. And I'm also... I was... a Sheriff."

"Oh," said Janet, "then yes, you are a horrible person. You shouldn't be here."

"I know," moped Emma. "And I'm ruining Neal's Tallahassee. He should have his soulmate here, but instead he got me. Again. I screwed up his life and now I'm screwing up his _Afterlife_. How did this happen?"

"I can't say. My programming is only to help acclimate and assist residents of this neighborhood. I am not involved in the actual process of selecting residents."

"You really can't tell anyone though, right?"

"As I said, anything you tell me is in confidence."

Emma nodded and took a drink. But what about Neal?

"Thanks, Janet," she sighed. "That's... that's it."

Janet nodded curtly and disappeared. Emma took her glass and the bottle to the couch and turned on the TV and brought up the menu of events of her so-called heroic memories that got her here.

 _Some_ savior vanquished a witch and saved an orphanage full of children. _Some_ savior stopped a magical tsunami from killing thousands of people and threw in a dungeon the witch who'd summoned it. _Some_ savior spent her free time returning stolen hearts to the people they were taken from. _Some_ savior gave a rousing speech about the difference between charity and justice, and holding villains accountable for their horrific crimes... and that was definitely _not_ her.

When Emma changed to the menu that would show her loved ones since her death, though, it was surprisingly correct. It was _her_ family.

Time really did seem to be relative, because more had passed than she'd thought back on 'Earth'. She watched her funeral - closed casket, thankfully - and cringed as Killian gave a forty-five minute eulogy that was ninety-percent about his feelings. Of course her mother blathered on about hope and things happening for a reason. And Henry made his eulogy all analogies to stories in that book and how she would live on as a legend, blah blah blah. Then regular people got up to talk, recounting times she'd saved them, including Cinderella.

 _People did like me_ , Emma told herself. _I did do good things_.

Then Grumpy got up, clearly a drunk, scowling and glaring at everyone and declared:

* * *

"Gimme a break! You're all a bunch of hypocrites and liars with your royal privilege! Emma wasn't a good person! And she was a shirty savior! She didn't give a crap about anyone but herself, not since she broke the Curse, got back from The Enchanted Forest, and had gone from ex-criminal newly-minted-Sheriff to whiny, petty, entitled little princess who ran terrified into Captain Herpes arms if a mouse farted!

"Sweetheart," he scoffed at Cinderella, "she only saved your dumb nearly-got-yourself-killed ash because her boyfriend batted his eyes at your kid and made her womb all tingly. The only happy ending that bench cared about was _his_ ," Grumpy pointed to Hook. "As if a three hundred year old murderer who brags about getting women drunk to bang them, handed over little kids to Peter Pan to keep his crew of perverts safe, and killed his own father to orphan his ten year old brother deserves any kind of future.

"f Emma Swan was the savior _we_ deserved, this _jackass_ and half the town would be locked up. Instead that hypocritical cant only arrested the bad guys when it was conveiennt to making sure that serial posey-grabber was happy."

Grumpy scoffed, "I'm _glad_ she's dead. And it's _not_ my fault. It's _yours_ ," he pointed to her parents, Regina, and Hook, even _Henry_ , "for indoctrinating a once good, just woman into your spoiled, entitled family of hypocritical asholes. Because before she believed she was the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, before she was The Savior, she helped us little guys and told the big bads, people like _you_ ," he pointed to Regina, Hook, and Zelena, "to fork off, because sociopaths who murder and rape with impunity don't get second chances.

"But you ruined her," he continued. "After breaking the Curse Emma didn't do jack shirt for any of us other than put us in repeated danger to save your not-sorry-for-anything ashes. _She turned Dopey into a tree_ , and did she bother turning him back? No! She didn't even remember he existed until she stormed into _my_ therapy session and demanded _my_ time that _I_ paid for to bench and moan about her love life problems! I'm sorry, but my problems were a hell of a lot more important than that stupid bench fretting about how her savior duties were ruining her dream of letting the rapist she dated for two months and nearly killed us all to drag out of Hell move into her creepy as fork murder house because he deserved puppies and kittens and rainbows and unicorn queefs for that one time he didn't murder or rape someone he could have because he was distracted by her ash bent over in painted-on jeans! And I probably wouldn't have fallen off the wagon if that bench hadn't butted in on my appointment time again last week to make excuses for her boytoy almost giving her herpes because he wasn't gonna tell her if she hadn't listened to Dr. Whale's voicemail, but somehow that wasn't his fault, the misunderstood little orphaned puppy! Ugh!

"And, yeah, I bugged Archie's office with a nanny cam, but getting therapy by proxy was the only forking way I could ever get it thanks to that selfish cant!"

Grumpy scoffed in disgust before declaring, "And you know what? I've attended dozens of funerals of regular people who died in magical catastrophes Emma Swan and her selfish ashole family caused. And not once did any of them show up. Not once did any of them donate to funds for their families or even bring over a forking casserole. There's no justice for normal people, no orange jump suits for their villain bootycalls and BFFs. Because none of them give two forks about us.

"So, yeah, The Savior is dead and we should be throwing a party and singing 'Ding Dong the Dumb Blonde Bench is Dead' cause she died as she lived: shirking her duties to this community to boink a sexual predator who tried to murder all of us and never contributed one positive thing to this town!

"It's time to take back Storybrooke from the entitled, oblivious, sanctimonious piece of shirt royals who have been getting in the way of _our_ happy endings! Who's with me?"

* * *

Emma watched in horrified dismay but also kind of fascination as the "regular people" jumped up cheering support for Grumpy and following him out of the chapel, some of them spitting at her parents. Even Archie was on the Dwarf's side.

* * *

"I'm sorry, but Grumpy makes a point. Your daughter really was my worst patient. She interrupted countless session like an entitled jerk and was very, well, intimidating about it. I felt like I couldn't refuse her, even though she was taking away time from my other patients who actually paid their bills and listened to my advice. Which Emma never did. She either stormed off after telling me my advice was stupid or chose to interpret my advice to mean whatever self-serving, self-destructive nonsense she wanted it to mean. I wanted her to get help for her actual PTSD and work on healing herself, reconciling the well-adjusted and _good_ person I first met with the weight of savior responsibilities. But instead she wanted to escape into a fantasy world and immerse herself in an emotionally abusive relationship just to feel like she was worshiped and never have to face her mistakes and the consequences of selfish actions.

"I believe she _was_ a good person once, but she was so insecure," Archie continued with an accusatory look, "and you both... you were such terrible parents, leaders, and _heroes_ that having no role models for any of those growing up, Emma emulated your terrible example and brainwashed herself into your entitled version of happiness like a child would do, because she was clearly stuck in arrested development since she was a teenager.

"And as for us little guys? You expect us to jump up and follow you and defend you, but when we need help, you're never there. You barely remember we exist at all. We'll, I'm done with that. I may have made some horrible mistakes in my life, but getting cursed made me realize I have to take accountability to actually redeem myself for those selfish actions. Clearly, the same can't be said for any of you!

"Come on Pongo!" Archie called to the dog who was urinating on her coffin...

* * *

Emma was more than a little disheartened, but it only got worse when she watched the reception lunch at Granny's, attended by only her family minus Gold. Hook moped and sniffled and needed reassurances that he would be okay (seeming to have not even heard Grumpy's accusations) and Emma's parents provided that while Regina just rolled her eyes and drank a bottle of wine while Zelena whined that her piano she wanted to curse everyone to break out into song until their vocal cords ruptured was ruined - and somehow even though it was her spell it wasn't her fault that Emma had died!

And after only a few minutes, Belle stood up, scowling at Hook.

* * *

"Grumpy's right. You know, I think maybe Emma was using some subconscious savior magic to influence our feelings, because why would I put any kind of trust in any of you? In a woman who imprisoned me, a man who shot me, the rest of you who never once came to my aide. You left me in The Underworld! You didn't try to wake me up. And, you know what? Archie's right! Trying to make you understand what horrible people you are won't make a difference. You'll just twist it into some lesson the universe threw at you, because everything is about you, to teach you to be better people. But the thing is? You never actually learn that lesson. Anyone who believes in justice and nonviolence, in using knowledge and words instead of swords and arrows and fireballs isn't good enough to join Team Hero."

"Oh, please!" Zelena scoffed at her. "Get off your pedistal, bookworm! No magic made you trust the pirate's word that your husband was up to no good and toss him out of town when he was clearly suffering the after-effects of my horribly torturing him! Or trust your son who wasn't even the size of a pea in a dream. Nottingham told me all about your dark side. You have a villain fettish. Nothing wrong with that. Only denying it and pretending you're a self-righteous little cant!"

* * *

Emma watched Belle storm out only to realize Henry wasn't in the diner anymore. She found him out back where Violet was waiting.

* * *

"I'm sorry everyone left your mom's funeral."

Henry shrugged. "It's fine. The stuff I said? It was just the nice stuff you're supposed to say at funerals. She was my mom, and I love her, I guess, but it's not like I ever got to know her. Not like my other mom who raised me. We didn't meet 'til I was ten and then there was some magical disaster every five minutes. And that year we had in New York feels like it wasn't real, because we didn't have our memories, and after we got them back... it felt like that wasn't really her anyway, that it was what Mom shaped her into, because she instantly went from always being there to almost never being there.

"She was always with Hook," he said in disgust. "The only way I could even spend time with her was to spend time with _him_. And I had to act like I liked him, because she didn't care that I didn't like him. She went out with him anyway. She asked him to move in with us anyway. My dad had _just_ died, but all she cared about was making _him_ happy. She was selfish. And a bad mother. Which is so forked up. I brought her here because my mom was a selfish bench who killed people and didn't care and didn't know how to love and Emma basically ended up turning into that, the kind of mom I hated, that I didn't want to live with, while Regina became a good person who always puts me first.

"I was so excited when I found out my birth mom was The Savior, but I guess a magical label can't make you a good person. Or maybe she was never meant to be a savior at all, just a jerk, and that spell my grandparents had cast on her before she was born is the only reason she had powers and responsibilities... that Emma misused and ignored. I guess Mom was right all along, even if she was saying it to be a spiteful bench back in the beginning: _she_ is my _real_ mom. And maybe I am better off without the woman who gave me up."

"Wanna make out?" asked Violet.

"Sure."

* * *

Emma threw her empty bottle at the TV - which wasn't a physical thing so all she did was shatter the glass against a Velvet Elvis.

Her own son thought she was a horrible person who hadn't even loved him! She'd stayed in Storybrooke terrified that she wouldn't be good enough, be a good mom, desperate to prove that she could be, and she'd failed completely! She'd let herself get distracted by Hook's flattery to not have to deal with her fears and insecurities... that she apparently had made all about him to not have to face her issues with anyone else, including her son. She'd remade herself, the way she did after Cleo died, into a different person, the person she needed to be to be loved by a pirate. What had Grumpy called her? "a whiny, petty, entitled little princess."

Emma opened another bottle of rum and mused darkly that she'd also turned herself into an alcoholic for love. She wondered how many negative points she got for that...

* * *

Next up: Neal's Tallahassee gets a wrench thrown in it.


	4. Oh, Fork!

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fork.**

* * *

CHAPTER FOUR

OH, FORK!

Someone was banging on her door. Finally, Emma heard the door open and footsteps on the hardwood.

"Waiting for a pirate to fall on top of you and jab you with his sword?" Neal taunted.

Emma glared up at her ex who was, for some reason, wearing a jailbird striped jumpsuit but in red and blue. "What are you doing here? I thought you wanted nothing to do with me."

"I don't. But since I'm the only one who knows you're responsible for the destruction of The Afterlife..."

"I'm what?"

The ground suddenly shook and Emma heard screams. Heading outside she made several unsettling discoveries:

The ground was covered in Middle Mists.

Flying monkeys were throwing poop.

And a pair of giant blue suede shoes were chasing giant three story high onion rings that were leveling everything in their path, including giant bottles of rum like bowling pins... and a cute little puppy dog.

"Oh, _fork_ ," Emma gasped, and just then a giant fork fell from the sky and mowed in half the pretty lilac bushes she'd walked past the other day.

"This is you, obviously," Neal hissed as a purple butterfly the size of a DC-7 dive-bombed screaming people while farting purple smoke trails. "You being here has forked up Tallahassee."

"Tallahassee was a bug-infested swamp, Neal," Emma snapped back, "where I spent two years waiting for you to show up after going through being pregnant and giving birth in prison. If I'm a bad person, it's your fault. And if my being an ashole is your fault, then you shouldn't be here either!"

"Just figure out how to stop it!" Neal growled back, dragging her back into her ugly house to avoid the now fire-breathing butterfly.

"I don't know how to stop it!"

"You could stop chugging rum like a pirate!" he pointed to the empty bottles scattered on the floor by the couch.

"Hey," Emma gasped, "I just realized I don't even have a hang-"

There was a knock on the door and a shout from Michael of "EMERGENCY NEIGHBORHOOD MEETING!"

* * *

"I'm sorry a giant onion ring destroyed your house," Emma apologized back at her ugly house after the meeting.

Everyone was ordered to stay indoors. At least things seemed to be calming down since clothes were changing back - clothes which had required a quick wardrobe change with Janet's help to keep anyone from being suspicious of her.

"Michael said he would repair everything."

"Won't stop the bad things from happening," Neal argued from the couch in front of the TV that had the Hospitality Channel on showing a scrolling emergency message, "any more than Regina could stop her happy ending from unraveling when you got to Storybrooke."

"I was a good person once, wasn't I?" Emma told him. "Maybe I can be good again and fit in here and bad stuff will stop happening."

"Do you even remember how?" Neal challenged.

Scowling, Emma and took a seat beside him and held out a box. "Yes. I do. I even made you something to prove it!"

Neal regarded her suspiciously but opened the box. It was a dreamcatcher. He frowned. "Gonna steal my memories?"

"I can't. I don't have magic here, duh," Emma tried to joke, but his expression wasn't joking and she sighed. "You don't like it?"

"Why would I like it?" Neal challenged, tossing the box onto the coffee table. "My dreamcatcher held eleven years of good memories. There was even a replica in my house when I got here. Then I switch on the TV and not only did you tell Hook that _I_ gave the dreamcatcher _to you_ , because why the fork did he even have a right to know about that or anything of ours? But then you're making hundreds of dreamcatchers to fork over everyone you were supposed to help, including our son. You ruined the one good thing I had here to remind me of us five minutes after I got here, so why the fork would I want to be reminded of that again after you show up and ruin the few days of happiness I had in The Afterlife, where I wouldn't even be if I hadn't been stupid enough to still love you?" Neal growled and stood up.

Feeling crushed, Emma tried to defend herself. "I don't know why I told him that. He saw it when I got back with Lily and he asked, so I just said whatever to get him to drop it. And you know being The Dark One twists love into something toxic. You know what it did to your dad and you. I wasn't trying to destroy our memories. I wasn't trying to hurt you."

"You could have fooled me," Neal scoffed, "pining for an ashole who used 'love' to hurt you the moment he found out what you made him. My old man never did that to anyone as The Dark One. He didn't call them names. He didn't rip out my friends' hearts to use me in spells to cover up murder. He didn't weave a bunch of baby blankets to steal memories or replicate tea cups to poison people. Stands to reason from that, he was a good person who loved people before he got cursed. You and your forkboy pirate? Just a couple of pretender asholes who only love themselves."

Shaking his head, Neal argued, "You're too selfish to be a good person, Emma. The only thing you're concerned with is your own happiness. That's your problem. And if you couldn't change that for Henry, if you became an even more selfish person despite him, then you sure as shirt can't change here."

"I was concerned with my happiness because I promised _you_ I would be happy," Emma shot back, standing up and facing-off against Neal. "I had to keep that promise."

"Seriously? That's your logic?" Neal laughed sardonically. "When you shirted all over every principal you used to stand for - that _I_ stood for - to find happiness with a murderous rapist douchebag who handed me over to Pan out of spite. _That_ was keeping your promise? Not trying to save me in any way, shape or form, still blaming me for everything while declaring Pinocchio your best friend and Hook your one true love?"

Neal shook his head. "Naw, I don't wanna hear anymore of your bullshirt, Emma. Your parents were right when they told me not to try and find you. They were selfish pranks about it, but at least I wouldn't have died only to find out that the woman I died trying to get back to had forked me over and dragged my son to The Underworld to fork my rapist stepfather while using the intel that my old man provided-my father that I traded my life for so he could help you-to go back in time and fork up history to dance at a forking ball and then let my murderer rape a guy and live happily ever after!

"So, basically, I died for nothing _because of you_ ," Neal accused. "And I can't even catch a break _here_! But you're seriously surprised that I don't want any of your forking apology presents? You treated me like shirt when I apologized for leaving you, Emma, and I wasn't even trying to be an ashole when I did. That was August's fault. But he's your BFF and saves the day while I get to be dead and forgotten. I'm sorry I left you. I'm sorry I trusted August. I'm sorry I acted like a jerk when you did find me, because I knew I forked up and I didn't deserve your forgiveness. And I'm sorry that when I apologized I let myself actually hope that maybe you could forgive me and give me a chance to try and make up for what I did, because you didn't and all I got for that watching my son not even remember me at my funeral while you made doe-eyes at the hot bad boy, because, sure he murdered a bunch of people, conspired with a mass murderer, killed his own father, raped dozens of women, and threatened to rape you, but you didn't love him at the time he didn't any of that shirt, so he was a good guy you could forgive anything. I trusted one idiot, made one mistake that hurt you, and I'm an unforgivable prank who doesn't deserve justice, doesn't deserve even a week of mourning before you're off on some _Grease_ cosplay date, because fork it if my kid isn't okay with it, you'll just make him hang out with that creep until he's brainwashed into thinking the few good moments we had, the few things I actually taught him, really get credited to Hook."

Scoffing, Neal concluded as he grabbed his coat and scarf, "I'm surprised you didn't go back in time and have _Killian_ knock your teenage self up instead so you could completely eliminate me from your life. Make Henry into a leather-fetishist, blue-eyed budding date rapist so he could fit perfectly into your shirty little happily ever after instead of being an annoyingly inconvenient reminder who took away from your pirate time on the rare occasions you even remembered where you'd misplaced him between the latest family shirt that nearly got him killed and you running into Captain Comb-Over's arms to kiss all his boo-boos."

Neal opened the door and concluded, "Go figure how you were more mature and had better morals when you were seventeen."

As the door slammed, the dreamcatcher burst into flames.

Emma tried not to cry over the charred hoop of melted twine and feathers. She'd really thought Neal would like it, that it was the perfect peace offering, a chance to start over now that she had some perspective on the mistakes she'd made in her life and could try to be the good person she really had wanted to be after Cleo believed in her and showed her that she didn't have to live in a perpetual state of criminal loser self-pity after giving up her kid; that she didn't have to keep punishing herself for not being ready to be a mom and could try to make a difference in the lives of other women and kids.

But maybe Neal was right. Maybe she wasn't even a good person then. If she had been, she wouldn't have still been having one night stands with the same kind of jerks she hauled in who just didn't have money attached to their names or used that money for expensive apartments and a closet full of designer leather jackets to be Cleo but better. She wasn't better.

"Janet!" Emma called and Janet appeared. "When I was twenty-seven I met this bounty hunter named Cleo. Is she in The Good Place?"

"No," answered Janet. "She is in The Bad Place. She was a few points shy of making the cut for one of our neighborhoods when she died."

"But... she doesn't blame me, right?"

"Actually, she does. She really hates you. She was not very happy with how you tracked down her daughter. You got negative points for buying a jacket while that girl was bawling her eyes out after discovering her mother was dead. Impersonating a dead person you helped get killed to create a more positive image of yourself rather than working to improve your own self, and then using that fake persona to lie to your son and your parents and everyone until you fooled even yourself into believing you had earned it and transformed your emotional armor into two dozen very expensive super hero capes that could have fed a forest worth of refugees-"

"I get it, I suck," Emma deflated. "I thought Henry showing up meant Cleo forgave me."

"Well, she didn't," shrugged Janet. "Is that all?"

"Yeah. Thanks," grumbled Emma and after Janet disappeared she sunk back onto the couch.

On the Hospitality Channel Michael was repeating his warning that everyone shelter in place until the cause of the disruption was found.

"I didn't mean to ruin everyone's Tallahassee," Emma moped and wondered how much worse things could get.

* * *

Next up: Things get worse!


	5. Flying High

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fork.**

* * *

CHAPTER FIVE

FLYING HIGH

Trash duty sucked, Emma lamented as she jabbed garbage with a pole. It reminded her of prison before she found out she was pregnant, those unbearably hot Phoenix days being forced to pick up trash by the side of the highway .

"Stupid Neal," she jabbed at some crazy random colorful trash.

It didn't help that the TV service was working again and she'd kind of gotten addicted to watching her family back on Earth... or rather The Enchanted Forest. The peasant revolt had somehow resulted in everyone going back there _again_.

Emma wasn't clear on the details, but it sounded like King George or some other royal had done it to put the peasants in their place of abject poverty and there was a war going on between the kingdoms now.

Somehow Henry had been brought with them - so maybe it wasn't a curse, and when she first saw him her heart had swelled a little upon discovering that her son had found the swan keychain and started wearing it. That is until Violet had asked about it...

* * *

"My dad gave it to my birth mom the day I was conceived," Henry explained on a walk through the woods. "That's what Emma told me, anyway. I found it in her box of stuff at the Sheriff's station. She stopped wearing it after she became the Dark One."

His frown increasing, Henry amended, "Belle said she gave it back to my dad in New York and it went with him back here, when Pan cursed us, so that meant it was touched by true love magic. But I dunno anymore. Archie said she told him that she only had worn it to remind her that she hated my dad and never to get tricked again, but then after he died she didn't need it anymore because she'd found her happy ending with Hook."

"They did seem happy," shrugged Violet.

"Happy ignoring my existence," harumphed Henry. "That's all that mattered to her, you know? She didn't even come talk to me when she thought she was gonna get killed by that savior curse. I wasn't as important as her boyfriend. And I knew her 'I wouldn't change anything' speech about how important being my mom was had to be a total lie. I didn't need a bs superpower to tell that when she ignored me for days. I mean, not even my grandparents cared! I ended up talking to Jasmine, a total stranger, in their own house, because it's like I was invisible! I reunited them all, but none of them gives a crap that I even exist, and Emma was the worst offender!"

Gripping the keychain, Henry cooly stated, "So this is my reminder that being called a 'hero' doesn't mean someone's a good person. Sometimes they're just regular old asholes."

* * *

That's what it came down to. Her son was wearing something that was supposed to be a momento of true love, but because she'd worn it to spite his father, now he wore it _to spite her_. It was true that she'd told Archie that during one of their first sessions, but only because she was angry at him and spouting all kinds of bullshirt to deflect from his wanting to get to the bottom of the sudden changes she'd made in her life since being the Dark One, which had included not bothering to put her old jewelry or Graham's bootlace back on... and sort of dressing like a feminine version of Hook a lot, she now realized after asking Janet to replicate her old closet back on Earth. There were a _lot_ of black leather jackets and pointy-toed black leather boots... and for some reason she'd gotten really obsessed with haute couture blouses, which she sort of thought was some residual bit of Nimue.

"Stupid Nimue!" Emma grumbled, at least satisfied that bitch was in The Bad Place now.

Slumping onto a bench, Emma wiped at a sudden onset of tears at thoughts of how much her son hated her and what her angry ranting to that blabbing shrink made him think about her and that she never stopped hating his dad. It wasn't true. She had stopped. She just... couldn't face that she had when it was too late to matter and it seemed had so many emotional and psychological problems that her family was completely inept at dealing with that there was no one to point out that she was in a toxic, codependent mess just as bad as Belle and Gold out of some stupid fear of ending up alone or not being good enough and disappointing everyone who was counting on her.

Which she had done. Worst of her all her kid who'd now have a shirt-ton of emotional and psychological issues, and to be honest, Archie was a crap therapist who probably would make things worse for Henry.

"Screw this!" Emma finally decided, wiping at her tears and angry at feeling sorry for herself.

She wanted to go flying. Flying was a perfect distraction from the crap she couldn't change. She'd done a lot with magic, but not flying. Even Henry had gotten to fly. And a pirate ship and a carpet didn't count.

Leaving her trash behind some bushes, Emma hurried to the town commons where the flying thingies were set up. "Suit me up, Janet!"

It was as awesome as Emma thought it would be. She was soaring through the air, deciding if a cloud looked more like a unicorn or a kraken when suddenly she was struck upside the head! It hurt! And she went plummeting back toward the ground along with all of the other people around her. She tried to stop herself with magic, but of course she didn't have it and hit the ground fully Loony Tunes style.

But she was already dead and unlike The Underworld you couldn't die again here. You could, however, continue to get pummeled with raining garbage!

Her neighbors ran screaming for cover and Emma herself barely avoided being smooshed again by a giant dead butterfly that had been stepped on by a giant shoe. She ended up huddled under the awning of a frozen yogurt shop and was, to her dismay, soon joined by Neal.

"It just started raining garbage. Crazy, huh?" Emma gasped and his eyes narrowed.

"Okay, fine, I didn't take all my stuff to the dumpster, okay? But in my defense there was only five minutes left for flying and I never got to fly even with magic."

"That's not a defense!" Neal growled.

"Yes it is, just maybe not a good one," Emma argued and rolled her eyes. "Oh, come on, the rules here stink, Neal. We did stuff like this back in Portland-"

"When we were dumb homeless kids, not grown-ash adults who know better," Neal reminded. "I turned my life around after that. You obviously didn't. And don't you dare try pinning that on me. You didn't have to break parole. You didn't have to run from the law. You could have finished school. Become a really good person, the person I knew you had it in you to be."

Emma scowled. "I didn't have it in me anymore after I gave up Henry, okay? I gave up my goodness with him. I couldn't... if I made something of myself, then that meant I could have kept him," she admitted, "and I couldn't face that. I had to be a loser criminal so I was making the right choice giving him up, so that's what I became!"

She sighed and kicked at some trash, amending, "That doesn't mean I _liked_ being one, okay? Or that I liked never having a real relationship, that I didn't get lonely and then feel like dirt for having one night stands with the kind of jerks I ended up hauling in as a bounty hunter," Emma admitted.

"And it felt like crap that I was that bad a person but somehow still a savior," she continued with a sigh. "Hook was the only one, I guess, who didn't see all the selfish stuff I did as selfish non-savory stuff. He knew all the dark stuff but would tell me I was an amazing selfless hero."

"Because he's a psychopath incapable of real emotion. That's messed up, Emma."

"I know it is!" she huffed. "But he harassed and harassed and harassed me until I couldn't say 'no' anymore, until I wasn't sure anymore why I didn't want to be with him and maybe I'd misread his stalking as being dedicated to my safety and happiness because everyone else said he'd changed and true love and stuff because of a story in a book that shouldn't have even been there!"

Emma's shoulders slumped.

"I know I should have saved you instead," she told Neal, "but I'm dumb and selfish and shallow and you really deserve better than the person I became, Neal. You're right that I'm not a good person. I wasn't for a long time after you left. I made fun of you in New York because I was insecure, because I knew I didn't deserve the good life that fell in my lap, because after getting caught in the lie that you were dead I was worried everyone would find out that I hadn't been some arm of justice, hauling in deadbeats for the last ten years to fight for good and stuff... but instead I was a loser criminal on the run from the law who got caught, got a lenient judge who gave me community service by irony and I was only bringing in deadbeats for the money and to get my record cleared while I was banging the same kinds of asholes on the side who just didn't have bounties on their heads."

She shrugged and conceded, "So, yeah, I'm a horrible person who doesn't deserve to be here. Michael even mentioned me, the real me that he doesn't know is _me_ me and what a horrible person that woman is and that she'll be going to The Bad Place for helping murderers and rapists and screwing up history and stuff.

"I don't know why he has no idea that's me. How he's got my name and other basic stuff about my life right like where I was born and how I died, but the criminal stuff is missing and somehow all the selfish stuff I did as a savior has been replaced with really amazing stuff some other savior did."

Emma grimaced and told Neal, "I bet that other savior is your _real_ soulmate. And I'm sorry that you got stuck with me because some curse made us meet and someone made a clerical error and I ended up here instead of The Bad Place. You deserve to be happy, Neal. I mean, yeah, you made some mistakes, but you were really sorry for them and you spent your life trying to make up for that stuff.

"I wasn't that sorry for mine. I mean, sometimes I was, in the beginning, but everyone kept telling me that nothing was my fault, that I should just use mistakes as lessons to be an even better person than the awesome person I was."

Frowning, Emma amended, "Well, accept for Killian when he was a Dark One and he basically told me that I'd always be just an orphan loser pretty distraction. Turns out he was right. Well, maybe not the 'pretty' part. The whole savior and being a bad person thing..."

"Made you look like a heroine junkie?" Neal described and she scowled.

"I was going to say resulted in some _slight_ premature aging and eczema issues that was really annoying because I ended up looking older than my parents who were actually younger than me," Emma huffed. "You're one to talk with the gray hair."

"Yeah, well, life wasn't exactly kind to me," Neal pointed out. "I nearly got killed by ogres as a kid, my father became the Dark One, I spent a couple hundred years being tortured by Pan, a decade living on the streets, another doing shirt minimum wage jobs - instead of having exciting rape and murder adventures and mooching off my codependent girlfriend. It had to catch up eventually."

Scowling, Emma told him, "Yeah, okay, maybe I deserved that. Or maybe you're just being a jerk like you were in New York because you thought I'd reject you so you tried to blow me off like you didn't care even though you do."

"No, it's definitely the first one."

"Okay, fine," Emma huffed. "I blew you off like I didn't care - _but I did_. I just... I didn't want to care. I didn't want to be reminded that I was good when I was with you, that I had to become bad after you left me. And I wanted to blame you for that, but it all got complicated and confusing and now I'm not good and somehow after everything, even all that time you spent in Neverland, you still ended up a good guy, which I'm sure is why you got a legit spot here, and now I'm ruining your Tallahassee, and I really am sorry, but I don't want to get kicked out. I don't want to go to The Bad Place, Neal.

"I want to get back to the good person I used to be," she explained, "before you left, before prison, before giving Henry away. Maybe that's not possible, but I want to try. I want to be someone you're proud of, that you respect, even if you don't want to be with me or even be my friend-"

"Emma-"

"Because you're the most generous, humble, kind person I've ever met and-"

" _Emma_ ," Neal cut her off. "The storm's over."

She blinked and looked around. So it had. "Oh."

Michael arrived as everyone was emerging to make an announcement, "Everyone! Obviously, the problem hasn't been completely fixed. While I work on figuring out what's out of balance, I want you all to enjoy a party tonight at Joanne's."

A slightly plump, sixty-something woman with red hair stepped forward and nodded. "Yes," she began in a British accent, "I would like to invite all of you to my home tonight. As neighbors we should all get to know one another and what better way than a ball?"

Emma groaned. "A ball? _Really_?"

"What, you don't like balls?" Neal asked. "You seemed really into grinding up against 'Prince Charles' balls at your father's whack engagement party. And King Arthur's Wicker Man themed celebration of keeping his wife from leaving him by brainwashing her and getting to rape her every night with her hypnotized consent. And-"

"I liked Hook. And I liked the free alcohol," Emma conceded, "but the old-timey music, the corset torture devices, and the small talk about Enchanted Forest politics was horrible."

"So you're admitting to being an alcoholic slug. And you know I mean _slug_."

Emma glowered. "Don't make me bench slap you with a butterfly carcass, Cassidy. I'm trying to make things right here!"

"Without exposing yourself as a fraud who isn't supposed to be here," Neal reminded. "And here it's Baelfire."

"Fine, _Lord Baelfire_ ," Emma snorted. "I guess I'll see you at the ball after I go pick out my drunk slug gown!"

* * *

Next up: The ball.


	6. Joanne & Jianyu

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fork.**

* * *

CHAPTER SIX

JOANNE & JIANYU

With Janet's help, Emma got a dress. She even managed to put her hair up and do her makeup without magic, something she hadn't done in years.

It was good not to look like crap! She'd been going makeup-free the past couple of days, and that was never a good look for her... or at least it had stopped being a good look for her after the toll being The Savior had taken. If co-habitating with Hook had been good for anything, it was to get off her lazy ass and start caring about her appearance again the way she had before all of the crazy magical shirt happening made her too tired to bother even putting on eyeliner in the morning. After all, he had a disturbingly large supply of the stuff!

Along with rum.

Her supply was dwindling, but Emma didn't want to show up to the ball drunk. Which didn't mean she wasn't going to get wasted there, of course. She could only take so much of balls of any kind. She'd pretended to like them for Killian and for her mother, but the clothes were uncomfortable, the music boring, and the food disgusting. The initial novelty of being part of a cliché fairy tale scene had worn off with repetition.

Thankfully, this wasn't an Enchanted Forest style ball, so the dress code was normal and people weren't arriving in horse-driven carriages.

Of course, Emma had no car and there was no Uber here. But everything was pretty close together in the neighborhood, or maybe its magic made it seem that way, creating convenient short cuts when you needed to get somewhere fast or got tired of the scenery.

Emma had never been a big fan of scenic routes either... or massive old-timey buildings, the likes of which Joanne apparently lived in. How anyone could maintain it seemed impossible since there were no servants here, but maybe Janet to do it with a wiggle of her nose or something...

Emma made a mental note to see if she could get Janet to clean _her_ house while checking her makeup in some fancy silver plates.

"If you're looking for the _Grease Live_ cast party," Neal startled her, "it's the next block over on Stepford Lane."

Emma turned and fought surprise to glower at her 'soulmate' who'd moved up from thrift store hoodies and coats to a surprisingly swanky three piece suit.

"At least I don't look like Scrooge McDuck."

"Hey, I am wearing pants," Neal defended. "And I'm not playing nostalgic dress-up for a creepy date where some guy who stalked me for months was a whiny little bitch all night about my not wanting to drink so he couldn't put moves on me in a compromised state. I assume with your full pardon of his past crimes, KillyPoo never told you about how he beat the shirt out of that Scarlet guy and pushed him through the library window unconscious. I totally sympathized with that poor thief, being forced to eat your breakfast trash and watch you make out with his attacker who threatened him with further bodily harm if he blabbed the moment you were out of sight drawing little 'Emma + Killian' doodles on your arrest report."

Emma glared while hating that she hadn't actually known that. Killian _hadn't_ ever told her about that.

"Hook may have pulled one over on you," Neal snorted, "but the PopTart thing was _all_ you, _Sheriff_."

Emma just glared harder at the accusation/insult and headed into the main room where people were gathering and enjoying shrimp cocktail and champagne. She did love shrimp cocktail and as long as the Champaign kept coming and she avoided Neal, maybe she could make it through the night.

A clinking of a knife against a champagne glass drew everyone's attention to Joanne who'd replaced her flying jumpsuit with a black gown and diamond tiara. Standing next to her was a young Asian man in robes.

"I thought good people were supposed to be humble and shirt?" scoffed Emma. "This place is like Downton freak'n Abbey on steroids."

"Shhhh!" Neal shushed, suddenly beside her.

"Stop following me!" Emma hissed.

"Welcome to my home, everyone," the red-haired woman began. "I'm Joanne. And this is my soulmate, Jianyu. He's a Buddhist monk and has taken a vow of silence so he won't be much for conversation, but he's a really good listener."

Jianyu inclined his head.

"No way are they soulmates," Emma snorted, grabbing a glass of champagne of a tray as Janet walked by, "even if she's a granny cougar and he's into old chicks. And who's she kidding with that tiara?"

"As for myself," continued Joanne, "I lived in a place even larger than this mansion, though I was a servant and not very well treated by my employers until I was cast out. A poor, penniless spinster with no family, I moved away, to a new land where I started a home for war orphans and for women who had been cast out for the simple misfortune of being ravished by brutish soldiers."

People applauded this, Emma halfheartedly. "Oh, I saved war orphans! I'm so perfect!" she snorted. "I guess she's sticking it to the man in the Afterlife then with the big-ash house. Classy." This got a glare from Neal. "What?"

"Yes, thank you," smiled Joanne. "Unfortunately, in my homeland many horrific crimes go unpunished on the whims of the gentry who decide whether or not a person should be pardoned of their murdering and raping regardless of whether or not they are remorseful and with no justice ever for their victims."

Shaking her head, the matronly woman lamented, "I wish I could say that I did find happiness in life, that my life ceased to be a daily struggle to help those souls more unfortunate than myself, but sadly those who are not young or not pretty or not rich, no matter how much they can contribute to society, in my land, go unrecognized at best and seem to suffer for the happiness of the undeserving at worst."

"There there," Michael patted her on the back and handed her a tissue. "You might not be remembered in that world, Joanne, but we were paying attention to all of your good deeds, and here you will definitely be appreciated."

"Thank you." Joanne sniffled and blew her nose, then continued, "Anyway, I didn't think there would be a happy ending for me. I wasn't a hero or a legend. I didn't have books written about me. I was a footnote in someone else's happily-ever-after story in life. As I know many of you here were as well. And even if you got recognition where you came from, well... many of you never got to live the lives you deserved or met untimely ends.

"Including, I understand," the old lady said and her gaze found Emma in the crowd, "the granddaughter of my aforementioned employer, whom I can only assume did great things before her woefully selfish and villainous family let her down as well..."

"Oh, fork," groaned Emma.

"Hold on," Neal hissed at Emma, "she knows you?"

"Anyway," smiled Joanne, "here we are free of all of that and I am grateful to be able to share this _true_ happy ending with all of you! Enjoy tonight! To the good people of The Good Place!"

People applauded and clinked glasses while Emma answered, "This is bad! I don't remember her at all! _Janet_!"

Janet appeared now with an upgraded ping and a platter of shrimp. "Yes?"

"Who is Joanne? Is she really from The Enchanted Forest? Did she know my family?"

"Yes and yes. Joanne was your grandmother Queen Eva's maid servant who became your mother's governess. Her employment was terminated upon your mother being declared a traitor and Queen Regina having no need for a governess."

"How did she die?" asked Neal.

"She was thrown off the Storybrooke clock tower by Cora, also known as The Queen of Hearts, after Snow White refused to hand over the Dark One's dagger."

"That was _years_ ago. And also, that's when I was in New York looking for you," Emma realized.

"Time is more fluid here with respect to Earth," said Janet. "And you are correct. You were in Manhattan having a very uncomfortable lunch at a pizza place while Cora was killing Joanne."

Emma grabbed another glass of champagne and more shrimp. "Okay, so maybe this won't be so bad. I mean, she died while everyone still thought I was a good person. And she's probably not watching home movies about my parents regaling my failures, right?"

"Sure," agreed Janet, continuing on just as Joanne and her silent soulmate came over.

"Emma," the older woman smiled at her. "Michael was just telling me of all the selfless, heroic things you did for people of fairy tale lands before your life was cut tragically short in unfortunate savior fashion. I hope you will consider me a sort of surrogate family."

"Ah... yeah... sure," Emma gulped and forced a smile. "You... ah... have a bit of a beef with my real one, huh? Janet said Cora killed you to get at my mom or something while I was out of town."

Joanne sighed. "How surprising, Snow didn't even mention my horrific death. You try to do something nice... I found her tiara and returned it, but she repaid me by getting benchy about not wanting to remember her mother which made me a target since Cora had that pirate spying on her. I died for some magical knife and she never even visited my grave after the funeral. I'd say she generously donated the head stone, accept she got my name wrong. Snow and her stupid mother always called me 'Johanna' because 'Joanne' sounded too common."

After sipping her champagne, Joanne mused, "But I suppose the joke is on her now. No way that high-maintenance princess is ending up here with all the lives she's utterly destroyed in the name of doing good. Honestly, she was a bratty child but I'd hoped for better. That drunk dwarf said once he suspected taking some memory-wiping potion to get over a broken heart resulted in permanent brain damage. If that's the case then I almost feel bad for her. And for her chump of a husband that now, according to Janet, shares half her heart."

Walking by again with more champagne and shrimp, Janet divulged, "Now they will both die when one gets killed!"

"And both go The Bad Place," sniggered Joanne. "Or The Underworld, I suppose, depending on that quill's magic from what Michael explained. Who'd have thought that book your kid found was actually evil?"

"My mother found it actually," Emma muttered, wondering why it never occurred to her that her parents were now doomed to die at the same time.

"Oh, well, somehow that makes sense. Further ruining her family's lives!" snorted Joanne before giving Emma a sympathetic look. "I do feel sorry for your son. Having to leave him with those people... it must be hard on you."

"Yeah, really hard," she grimaced and took another glass of champagne.

"I have a question," Neal asked, taking the glass from her. "Are there many other people from fairy tale lands in The Good Place?"

"There are not," Janet answered. "Fairy tale worlds are disproportionately filled with bad people compared to Earth due to the backward ethics, barely existent morality in the societies in which they are raised, and the influence of outsider immortals who want to keep them dependent on magic and the belief in 'happily ever after' and 'true love' which requires life unfold in a narrative fashion full of romantic tropes and villains. As such, the only people from any fairy tale worlds with a karmic number positive enough to even be considered for The Good Place if killed today are Mulan and The Woodcutter. Everyone else is deep in negative territory."

"It's true," interjected Michael as he wandered over with a glass in hand. "Your worlds really are just awful. How any of you make it out, even with innate savior morals to counter their bigoted social constructs, is rather miraculous."

He held out his glass, amending, "You really should consider yourselves extra special. You had a lot working against you, that's for sure! The medieval society is bad enough, but then screwed up social norms being impressed upon every generation by those stories in Zeus' books and dependence on the magic of those shady fairies. It's really so tragic that they all believe they are doing good works when it's the opposite, all so Zeus can maintain his supply of souls to entice with his lavish orgy parties in Elyssium or leave for the Titans to torment in Tartarus."

"What's that like?" asked Joanne. "Tartarus? Similar to The Bad Place?"

Janet answered, "I can play an audio feed of what is happening both places right now."

There was a sudden audio of people screaming in terror. A pause. And a very similar audio of people screaming in terror.

"Looks like your mother got a good deal in The River of Lost Souls then," mused Emma, to which Neal glared.

"What?" she scoffed, then Neal asked, "Hey, is Merlin here? I mean, in another neighborhood? He was pretty famous as a good guy before he was murdered and... didn't his killer's girlfriend cover up his murder and his killer was made a hero or something and neither of them were ever held accountable for his death and vaporizing his corpse so he couldn't even have a proper funeral?" he recalled, smirking at Emma who scowled back.

"They were not. And Merlin is not in The Good Place," said Janet.

"It's unfortunate," nodded Michael. "Sadly, he had a hard time making up for the whole bringing evil demonic magic in the mortal world by turning the Grail into a sword that he stabbed his girlfriend with. After fifteen hundred years he was close before that pirate, that for some reason, seems to get inserted into everyone's story in those worlds without any actual point - at least the Dark One made sense - apparently murdered him after his Dark One girlfriend made him also a Dark One... or is it a Dark Two?

"Anyway, Merlin came up just short. It's too bad. He did have an impressive file apart from that early evil-enabling phase and the time he spent as a tree. It didn't help that the kid he helped become king turned out an evil rapist murderer. Or that he tried to ensure a certain future outcome by terrifying a young child. Or that his apprentice turned out to be a creepy pedophile attempting to take over Zeus' books for his own nefarious purposes... one of which was probably making sure he went to The Underworld instead of The Bad Place."

Michael sipped his champagne and mused, "It's probably a good thing that serial killer woman with the magic dog breath was it?" Janet nodded, "was obsessed with getting that kid to write her back to life and following him everywhere. If that old geezer had gotten a young, impressionable Author alone in the woods... well... let me tell you, the things Merlin's apprentice has done make that creepy and possibly gigantism-afflicted minion of Pan's who diddled kids in their sleeping bags seem like a regular boyscout... as opposed to a Boyscout troop leader. Almost all of them are in The Bad Place. Like priests, DMV employees, and all the deceased members of the Portland Trail Blazers. Those organizations just seem to attract the bad ones.

"But diddling kids," grimaced Michael, "that's right up there with genocide in negative points."

"What about if you knew someone was diddling kids and handed your own step kid over to the guy out of spite for him not wanting to hang with you after your mom died?" asked Neal.

"Oh, that's also very bad."

"A negative 3,314 point two negative points," said Janet.

"What about dating someone you knew had done that?"

"A negative 2,158 point five points."

"And also knew this person had killed his own father to spite him for waking up from a sleeping curse after three hundred years, getting remarried, and naming his new kid after this person's idolized but actually a mass-murderer brother?"

"A negative-"

"We get it," Emma interrupted, "there's a lot of bad karma in dating someone you know was a criminal ashole who hurt people. I don't see why there's no leeway, though. I mean, if that person was trying to be better, not killing or raping or handing anyone over to pedophiles anymore..."

"Well, people who do that stuff repeatedly - and certainly for three centuries," said Michael, "are psychopaths. Psychopaths don't really change, they only affect the appearance of change to get what they want, whether it's a company, a country, or lover. I understand they can even almost convince themselves that they are capable of some form of empathy and change toward being more humanized...

"At least that's what I gathered from watching _Dexter_ before it just went off the rails with his sister having the hots for him and introducing that Hannah woman who seemed to undercut the entire original premise with the whole 'embrace the psycho' thing and then Dexter leaves his child with her while tossing his dead sister into the ocean and becomes a lumberjack. Am I the only one that was confused and disappointed by that?"

"No, everyone was confused and disappointed," Neal told him, "even the actors. The guy who played Dexter basically said the show became total bullshirt and he was embarrassed the way it ended and that he had to promote it like he didn't think it was a complete assassination of the characters, their relationships, and the entire premise of the show."

"Ah, well, that's something then."

"Janet, I'm gonna need more champagne and shrimp!" ordered Emma.

* * *

The next few hours were pretty miserable. Emma endured perfect people talking about their perfect lives while trying to keep _Joanne_ from talking about her _or_ asking her to talk about herself (She hadn't spent enough time watching those other memories to know all the good stuff she was supposed to have done!) until she could finally sneak away unnoticed.

Walking down the path to her house, Emma considered that the worst part was learning that Neal had spent the years after leaving her working to pay back all the people he stole from, including that jewelry store, even though insurance must have covered it anyway. He volunteered at some local Boys and Girls center to help runaway kids and he taught night school math classes to immigrants. He had gotten a degree in social justice so he could work as a children's court advocate and worked with the local Humane Society on a campaign to stop the Central Park carriage horses because of rampant animal abuses. All of which made her feel like even more complete shirt for making fun of his apartment _and_ admitting what a criminal loser she'd been.

And the whole PopTart thing.

That seemed far crueler now, Emma realized. Though considering she only did it because the cop in Portland did that to her was pretty shitty. Had she really turned from an abuse victim into an abuser?

Maybe she had.

Feeling quite depressed, Emma kicked at some remaining trash in the road. She hadn't wanted to turn out to be a bad person. Growing up, everyone said she'd be a loser, a criminal, amount to nothing.

Had she let the Savior thing go to her head? Had she not wanted to give that up even at the expense of her life because she liked the attention, the power, the glory the way Hook had loved revenge so much he'd repeatedly risked his life to try and off Rumplestiltskin? Was she really no better than Hook at his worst? Was he never really any better and just pretending and maybe deluding himself because he wanted to own her and make her his vision of a perfect happy ending where he got to be the hero while still doing shady shit but using love as a justification?

As she pondered these questions, Emma arrived at her ugly home, a replica of the house he'd picked out for her, that she only learned from watching Henry on the TV her son only 'helped' Killian pick out because he hoped she would hate it, because _he_ hated it and just lied to Hook that he thought it looked like a castle so that was cool.

Her own kid had tried to undermine her happiness, more than once, but maybe he'd really been trying to save her from a bad addiction that had ultimately gotten her killed. And the Universe was playing some awful prank on her.

And on Neal.

Continuing on past the house, Emma ended up on Main Street and found where she'd stashed her trash bags. She spent the rest of the night picking up everything she'd caused to rain down on the neighborhood. It was the right thing to do. It was the kind of thing she would have done when she got to Storybrooke, desperate to be a good person and a good example for Henry.

The person she was when she died would have ordered Leroy and the other Dwarfs to do it while she had kinky role-play Dark One sex with Killian in the basement dungeon cave.

By dawn Emma's dress was filthy and ripped _and covered in grease_ , though the truth was, she didn't even like it. It was a replica of one her mom had bought for her, because it seemed Snow White considered the 1950's the equivalent style to Enchanted Forest gowns... or just watched a lot of 1950's TV shows that perfectly portrayed her vision of a happy ending without royal responsibilities and magical disasters.

Emma was pretty sure her mother helped Killian pick out his Danny Zucko-esque outfit too and probably suggested the rose. She was kind of obsessed with _The Bachelor_.

It kind of sucked to realize her mom had wanted her trapped in a marriage to a hot guy and giving him babies. Sure, she'd gotten herself into that situation out of her own stupidity and desperation, but weren't mothers supposed to bench-slap their daughters when they did stupid shirt like that?

"Ugh, I had a terrible mother," she sighed on the way in the front door of her ugly-ash house, unable to avoid it any longer.

"I know how that goes," responded Neal from kitchen where he was making-

"Is that grilled cheese?"

"You look like you worked up an appetite even after eating a pound of shrimp."

"It wasn't a pound," Emma grouched while taking a seat at the counter.

"I am sorry about your mom, Neal," she finally told him. "I didn't know she'd get tossed in that river. And she _did_ seem really sorry. And also seriously disgusted that I had moved on to her ex after you died, so she'd probably get good points for that."

Shoulders slumping, Emma amended, "I don't know why I thought it made sense to move in with a guy who didn't seem to even care that the woman he'd lived with for seven years and sought to avenge for three hundred years had been cast into eternal torment in the process of saving his butt. Or who'd handed my kid's father over to a child abuser for all that time and never tried to get you out. I was selfish and I chose not to face all of the bad things Hook did, because it was easier to delude myself that I had a good man and all of that crazy fairy tale stuff that was _just crazy fairy tale stuff_ so it didn't matter, not like real life, not like the stuff you did to me."

"I never wanted to hurt you, Emma," Neal told her sadly. "If I'd known August would run off with the money, if I'd found out you were pregnant, I would have done anything to fix things. For us to be a family. Finding out I had a son was the best and worst day of my life. I'd wanted a family my whole life... only to find out I abandoned my kid like father abandoned me," sighed Neal.

"You didn't know," Emma shook her head. "And you would have been a great dad, Neal."

"But Henry will never know that," he sighed. "You barely told him anything about me, Emma. Robin tossed my things in the trash and my father didn't even care. No one cares enough about me, who I was after I left the Enchanted Forest, to ever find out about my life. My father wants to forget I existed and get a do-over with my brother. Hook already told Henry a shirt-ton of lies about what great adventures we had together in Neverland so he could replace me with some forking delusion of what he gave up to be a spiteful sonofabench. Your parents contributed to my getting killed and either want to cover that up or are so forking full of themselves that they don't even realize it.

"So to Henry I'm just a concept, a guy he knew for a few days when he was little. Probably doesn't even remember what I look like anymore."

"I'm sorry," Emma sniffed. "He probably wishes he didn't remember me at all. I was just as bad a mom as my mom and her mom before her. I really let him down and Joanne's right. Now he's stuck with a bunch of a jerks."

"We do seem to have fallen into generational patterns," Neal agreed. "I just wanted to spare Henry from that, for him to be the one to get free. But I don't know if that's possible the way things are going. Henry's always been so obsessed with having some magical destiny and being important, all the crap your parents think matters the most."

"That I thought mattered the most," Emma sighed.

"A kid like Henry, with a family like that, with responsibilities like that," Neal shrugged, "truth is, even if he misses me, maybe the concept is better. I was never gonna live up to his expectations. He doesn't want a footnote for a dad. Maybe a dead hero is better, even if my heroism amounted to nothing and he has to attend my murderer's kids birthday parties."

"You're not a footnote, Neal!" Emma argued. "You're like some modern hobo Ghandi. I thought you were just some loser on food stamps being played by some crazy bench for your dad's money... and then the whole Pan cult thing. But you actually did really good stuff. You helped more people than I ever did, probably. Than anyone in my family even. I never even _followed up_ with the Lost Boys."

"But Henry doesn't know any of that, and he probably never will," shrugged Neal. "And even if he did? It's not _magic_ heroism, it's regular life doing good that like Joanne said, in our world you don't get knighted for or a ball thrown in your honor. It didn't include swordfighting or damsel saving. All I did was talk to some messed up kids, help people adjust to new lives, work my butt off at shirty jobs to pay back what I took. It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't legendary. And I don't look like a GQ cover model, so I don't get an automatic pardon for the bad things I did besides. I'm just a regular, average, ordinary guy who tried to do a little more good in the world than I did bad and wasn't ever looking for a spotlight. Those things... they're not reality qualities that matter in our world - or to our family."

Emma's shoulders slumped because it was true. "I wish I could go back and change things so we could have the happy ending we should have had instead of the mess I made of everything."

"That why you picked up all that trash by yourself?" asked Neal, sliding the sandwich onto a plate.

Emma shrugged. "It was my fault it was there in the first place."

Taking her plate, she concluded, "I'm gonna take a shower and go to sleep. Thanks for the grilled cheese... Baelfire."

"You can still call me 'Neal'," he answered.

Emma smiled, but she didn't turn around. She took a bite of her gooey sandwich and shut her bedroom door. To her surprise, the badly burned dreamcatcher hung by the window looked a little less completely ruined.

Curious, Emma went to inspect it, only to be startled by a dove flying in - with a postcard.

On the front it said "Welcome to The Good Place" with a picture of a frozen yogurt shop. On the back someone had written: "I know you don't belong here."

* * *

AN: Jianyu is borrowed from _The Good Place_ , but he is not Jason Mendoza. Also, to Bix and others, don't worry! I know this is very anti-Emma right now, but this is inspired by _The Good Place_ , so Emma has to start off a real creep like Eleanor. (Poor Johanna is so unimportant, her character isn't even on the list for this site!)

Next up: Emma panics. And a day in the afterlife of Baelfire.


	7. Mother Nature Is a Bench

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fork.**

* * *

CHAPTER SEVEN

MOTHER NATURE IS A BENCH

Birds were singing, frozen yogurt was churning, and all seemed well again with The Good Place. But all was not well in the mind and heart of Baelfire.

The truth was, as he walked down cobblestoned streets, Neal wasn't sure that he really deserved to be here.

He _supposed_ that 300 years in Neverland helping kids escape Pan and the stuff he did after leaving Emma and inadvertently getting her sent to jail and having to give up their son because August took the money offset that and his petty criminality. And resurrecting the Dark One if the tragic irony of his own death and not getting to raise his son hadn't balanced that out.

He'd found Michael's holo cube computer thing at the party and he was second to last on the list, which didn't bother him apart from wondering if it was a mistake that he should be here at all.

Also, it annoyed him that Emma was sixth. _Sixth_. Even if he was here in error, he should be the one who was _sixth_! The Emma he once knew had turned selfish and shallow and had done and allowed horrible things! She did some sorry sometimes, but most of the time she was still the selfish, fairy tale mentality brainwashed bench he'd watched fork up his deathbed promise on his TV.

It both annoyed and baffled Neal how the woman he loved had turned into the woman who ignored their son and let people get away with cold-blooded murder, who covered up murder herself, for what amounted to no logical reason or even illogical reason and seemed more like laziness and apathy than anything - along with wanting to get laid by a certain pirate, of course!

Neal shoved his hands deeper into his pockets and grit his teeth.

He really wished he hadn't forgiven Hook for his own piece of mind. The ashole clearly took it as a blessing to get into Emma's pants the moment he kicked it! And Emma practically tossed her panties into his grave!

If everyone knew who Emma Swan _really_ was...

But Neal couldn't do that to her. Not because he loved her in some twisted way still. And certainly not because she was his soulmate, because that clearly wasn't the case. But because, sure she was a jerk, but The Bad Place sounded _really_ bad. The Underworld was more what she deserved, but if she got sent there, Hook and her stupid family would just find a way to resurrect her and create more problems, get more innocent people killed.

So Neal was kind of between a rock and a hard place with this one. Keep Emma's secret and things could continue to go awry in the Afterlife. Out her and she could find her way back to the land of the living to hurt more people there with her oblivious selfishness; or out her and feel guilty about getting his kid's mother and one time true love sent to Hell.

"Baelfire!" a familiar voice called out, just the one he _didn't_ want to hear - other than Emma's - and Neal turned toward Michael, seated at one of the frozen yogurt shops. "Why don't you join me?"

Seeing no way to get out of it, Neal sat down across from the quasi-deity and inquired, "So... ah... any idea what caused the craziness the other day?"

"I'm afraid not," sighed Michael. "Something was clearly out of balance. I don't know if I miscalculated something in the schematics or maybe a couple was placed in the wrong neighborhood and they're not as harmoniously matched with everyone else here..."

"Emma does like the beach," Neal found himself saying, not sure why. "She said she always wanted to live by the ocean."

Michael frowned at that. "Really? I don't remember that from her file. Hmm, that could be it. Thank you, Baelfire! I have work to do!"

As the white-haired Architect hurried off, calling out for Janet, Neal shrugged and took the man's left-behind frozen yogurt that somehow tasted like that feeling you get when your cellphone battery is fully charged. Better than pot.

He was just settling into blissfulness when, naturally, Emma dropped into Michael's seat looking alarmed. "I'm forked!" she gasped, shoving the post card across the table and continuing in a hushed tone, "A bird left this in my room last night. Johanna must be onto me!"

"You mean Joanne."

"Whatever!"

Neal examined the card, brows furrowing. "Okay, but you hadn't done anything bad then as far as she knew. Like you said, everyone good in Storybrooke loved you. You were their savior. You broke the Curse. Even if she's pissed at your mom, that had nothing to do with you. She practically adopted you last night."

"Yeah, but she could just be a good actor! Maybe she wanted to lull me into a false sense of complacency and then BAM. Or she looked in on her loved ones after I left and came across my family blabbing about all the crap I did! Or maybe she asked Janet!" Emma suggested, looking around suspiciously.

"Maybe, but you could also just be manifesting your guilt," Neal suggested. "I mean, only you, me, and August know about the significance bird delivered postcards. It's awfully random otherwise."

Frowning, Emma looked at the postcard again. "You think so?"

"You manifested all kinds of craziness the other day. This is just a less... apocalyptic manifestation of your crazy."

Emma glared at him. "Gee thanks."

Neal sighed. "What do you want me to say, Emma? You're not supposed to be here. You're mucking up the harmony with your selfishness _and_ your guilt complex over that selfishness. Why don't you go... I don't know... help _Joanne_ garden or something instead of sitting inside all day watching your family continue to ruin their happy endings."

"But I hate gardening! I only ever did it with magic so my mother wouldn't get on my ash about my front yard looking like crap," whined Emma.

"Your point?"

Emma increased her glare and snatched his frozen yogurt before stomping off down the street, nearly running over Joanne's soulmate on his way out of the yogurt shop.

"I hate my afterlife," sighed Neal and the Buddhist monk offered him his frozen yogurt and took the seat Emma had left.

"Thanks, Jianyu," Neal told the silent man, "but you keep it. I'm sure you deserve it more than I do, freeing Tibet or whatever."

The monk shrugged and Neal sighed and told him, "I have a kid back on Earth. Henry. I didn't even known he existed until shortly before I died. I barely got to know him. And my old man and Emma's family and my step-dad who became _his_ step-dad because my kid's mother is apparently kind of slutty will never even bother to investigate what I did with my life let alone tell my son.

"But the worst part? Even if Henry knew, I don't think he'd care," Neal lamented miserably. "His family, they're all from a world of magic, that one Joanne is from. I am too, but I left when I was a kid, and I grew up being, you know, normal. Not special or legendary like the rest of them. And now he's got that stolen magic quill of Zeus' and he's obsessed with epic stories and epic people, and he hangs out with really bad people who've done really bad things, but he thinks they can be good if they just stop murdering, like all the people they killed, the families they destroyed, don't matter anymore. And I hate that my kid is growing up with these forked up morals, never mind helping Zeus snatch away good people who should be here - _and bad people_ who should be _down there_."

Jianyu patted him on the shoulder and handed him a napkin he'd been doodling on, a picture of the craziness the other day and gestured to the serene day around them.

Neal smiled a bit. "You're saying I shouldn't dwell on the bad stuff. I should live in the moment. Each day like it could the last, right?" _Because maybe it will be thanks to Emma_. "Thanks, buddy. Joanne was right. You are a really good listener."

* * *

Emma was dirty all over again, her hands in the soil in the back of Johan - _Joanne's_ \- massive mansion that looked like Versailles. After being bombed.

"I'm so glad you came over, Emma!" the redheaded woman told her while dumping a plant out of a plastic pot. "I had no idea you liked gardening. It was always a hobby of mine, when I could find the time between my servant duties. I had a big garden back in Storybrooke before... well... you know. But I want you to know that I don't blame you for that. You weren't there. You'd made a deal with Rumplestiltskin before you knew never to do that."

"A nasty habit of my family, I guess," snorted Emma and she amended, "I do want to say I was sorry, though, that my mother forgot you. I don't think it was her fault. I mean, okay, it was a little bit her fault, but besides that potion thing, she's had _a lot_ of concussions in her life. Shortly after my brother was born she even cracked her head open on a rock so bad you could see brains. I healed it with magic, but I was, admittedly, still a novice at the whole magic anything so... I think maybe she should have gone to the hospital and gotten actual medical attention she was never quite as sharp after that," she explained, wondering if she got negative points for that.

"Well, Snow White was never the sharpest sword in the armory, honey, so don't feel too bad about it," shrugged Joanne. "Her father's fault for sure. Her mother was cunning. Right calculating when she wanted to be. Leopold was, to speak frankly, a doofus who had a type: barely legal raven-haired, cold-heated benches. Eva played him as much as Regina ever did, she just cared more what people thought about her. I'm sure if that woman had magic, though, she'd have been every bit the Evil Queen as her successor - and bumped Leopold off the moment she had an heir. Oh, Eva loved Snow in her own way, but no one else. The same as Cora and Regina, I suppose. Eva was just a very good actress at the benevolent monarch bit. All us servants knew the sort of woman she really was even if she had Leopold and their daughter fooled!

"Snow obviously got a fair bit of that selfishness and narcissism," Joanne continued, "managing to put some ridiculous positive spin on all of her crimes to void their amorality. But thank goodness you got your father's compassion to counter that!"

"Yeah, good thing," Emma grimaced, wondering if she'd inherited an 'bench' gene from Queen Eva or something, because she was sure Neal would say she was a chip off that tiara. Was she just a better actress than her mother? Being likened to a woman who framed her rival for robbery, publicly shamed her as a cheating slut, and let a serial rapist go to get married to a doofus to sit her pretty ash on a throne was not a comparison that Emma wanted anyone to make, but she couldn't help wonder.

"Not to mention," Joanne considered, "I heard from Maleficent that your parents took out your dark potential before you were born and put it into some other baby. How horrible! That must have made both your lives extra difficult. You can't have light without darkness, after all. No Good Place without a Bad Place. But again, that just shows how desperate your mother is to be perfect and have everyone related to her be just as perfect."

"Yeah, she could get of controlling and hypocritically judgey," Emma recalled as she planted another daisy. "I wonder if me being dead means that Lily is now stuck with my darkness forever?"

"No," interrupted Janet who had appeared behind them with another box of flowers. "The darkness that was yours vanished when you died. Lily can now live her life without having to fight against a predisposition toward bad behavior."

"Did I get good points for that?" asked Emma.

"No."

"Figures," Emma mumbled.

"But any darkness you absorbed by proxy from the amoral actions of bad people around you to make up for the innate darkness you lacked did return to the magical force so that your soul could finally be complete."

Emma frowned at that. "So... if I were to do something bad here it would be because of my own darkness?"

"Correct!"

"Does that mean... the borrowed darkness... didn't effect my, you know, karma because it wasn't mine?" she asked, hopeful that she had an answer for how she got here.

"Nope. Even borrowed darkness counts. Like being the Dark One for instance-"

"Yeah, okay, I get it," Emma cut her off before she gave away too much.

"Thank you, Janet. That's all the flowers for today," Joanne told her, noticing Emma was jumpy.

Once the helper was gone, Joanne observed, "This having your own darkness back is bothering you?"

Emma shrugged awkwardly and lied, "I wondered if maybe I wasn't... adjusting to it or something and that caused the problems the other day. I do feel kind of different than when I was alive. More... I don't know... guilty than I used to be for stuff when I screwed up. I mean, not that I did a lot, but I was only human even as a savior, right?"

The older woman smiled. "I suppose that makes sense. Having dark potential and light potential are each a check on the other. Too much light, you begin to forget compassion, replace it with imposition and entitlement. Ultimately, it can lead to the same atrocities as darkness, just unintentionally through being blinded by your own ego into thinking you're always doing what's right. Like your mother. I imagine it would be harder with darkness that isn't your own, that isn't as well balanced. I suppose being a savior helped with that, but here you're not a savior anymore. You're just Emma."

"Yeah," Emma agreed, uncertain. She was relieved to finally be 'just Emma', but it sucked that Savior Emma had ruined Just Emma's happy ending.

"Have you talked to Baelfire about this?" Joanne asked. "I'm sure that would help. I mean, Jianyu doesn't talk, but just having him listen is so helpful. If you trust in your soulmate-"

"Yeah, about Jianyu," Emma wondered, "he's, you know, quite a bit younger than you. Are you two-"

"Oh, heavens no!" laughed Joanne. "He's a Buddhist monk. Silence and celibacy. Not that those are required here, of course, but I respect that. And I'm not necessarily looking for romance. That never seemed to stick for me in life, and I was okay with that by the end. Our world didn't really offer many truly good men after all. And friendships between men and women, well, that wasn't a thing. Romance or nothing. So it's nice having a friend, someone who shares my interests, but who isn't blathering on about gossip or trying to get in my pants!"

Smiling at Emma, Joanne asked, "So, what about you and Baelfire? Are you...?"

Emma grimaced. "We did in life, a long time ago. Even had a kid. Which he didn't know about for a long time. That's why I was in New York," she admitted and Joanne's eyes widened.

"Baelfire is Henry's father?" she asked, then laughed. "Well, I suppose that does make sense, doesn't it? You're both from The Enchanted Forest. His father was the Dark One-"

"And his curse made us meet," grumbled Emma. "Then life happened and we didn't see each other again until just before he died. I had a chance then to try again with him, but I didn't take it. I was still angry over what I thought he did, betraying me, when it was really Pinocchio who made him leave me, called the cops, and took all our money, but I was mad for so many years it was hard for facts to beat feelings, you know? Plus I was into someone else, someone who believed I was his happy ending and-"

"And since you were The Savior," Joanne deduced, "you thought it was part of your job to be that for this man?"

Shrugging, Emma answered, "Maybe. I don't know. I thought Henry could be Neal's happy ending. I thought I could not deal with our messy past and be that for this other guy. I did have feelings for him. Strong feelings. After Neal died, I thought it was love and that made losing Neal easier. But now... here... after what Michael said about Zeus messing with our world and magic and _love_ , I'm not sure anymore what I felt, if it was real, or I was just afraid to be alone and guilty that I wasn't able to save Neal, because if anything, my magic is why he died. And I was so flattered that this other guy thought I was his one true love and did everything and anything, including very bad things, to always come back to me when Neal had just let me go. I thought that meant he didn't love me as much, that it wasn't _true love_ , because you always fight for that and even though he tried later it was too late - and it killed him. But then when this other guy... I fought for him in ways that I didn't for Neal, maybe to try and make up for that. I guess I excused a lot of his betrayals because I couldn't forgive Neal until it was too late and I could never say I was sorry and change that."

Emma sniffed and concluded sadly, "Only now I did get that chance, but he doesn't seem to believe me, and truth is, I don't even know if that is the truth or if I just stopped caring about Neal and liked the attention I got as The Savior. Even if was definitely not into the 'doomed to die' part of it. Either way, I don't think we can be... romantically involved again. I don't even think we can be friends again... which is maybe what's messing things up here," she concluded, even though that part was probably the least of the causes.

"Well, maybe you should talk to Michael. It might not have occurred to him that this interference by that curse has caused problems for you and Baelfire here," Joanne shrugged. "He obviously still has a bit to learn about humans and what makes us tick."

"Yeah... I don't know," Emma winced. "Maybe."

"Well, at least talk to _Neal_ ," Joanne suggested. "Try to work through your past issues so they don't spill over into giant onion rings. Believe me, I know being angry at someone for not recognizing how hard you are trying _and_ feeling betrayed by someone you thought would fight for you. Neither side is easy. And my tragic fate wasn't tied up in the meddling of childish gods and egocentric scribes. It sounds like your story was being hijacked well before you were even born with that 'take out your potential darkness' thing. Maleficent was quite upset about that when I worked temporarily as her housekeeper-slash-egg-incubator. It was obvious your parents didn't understand the consequences of creating an unbalanced child, light or dark."

"You worked for Maleficent?"

"Well, I wasn't keen on going back to work for your mother and with the war your parents started it was hard to find good shelter. She let me relocate my orphans there after King George destroyed the old abbey we were using."

"I accidentally stabbed her with my dad's sword," Emma remembered. "I mean, she was a dragon and it was intentional, it was to get a potion Rumplestiltskin made her swallow, and I didn't know she was a person. And she wasn't even mad when she got her human form back. At me or my parents or anyone. She just wanted to get to know her kid. I guess she did enough bad things not to qualify for here, but I think she learned from her mistakes more than even the heroes did. I wish I could have fixed things with her and Lily. I never really made amends with Lily. I was so distracted with savior stuff.

"I was always so distracted with savior stuff," sighed Emma. "I should have spent more time with Henry. He doesn't think I was a very good person." _Because I wasn't_.

"Teenagers never think their parents are good people," Joanne tried to comfort her. "Henry lost his father and then he lost you, after bringing you to Storybrooke in the first place. He probably feels guilty."

"I didn't die an heroic death. I got hit by a drunk-driving Dwarf while buying condoms and lube and then a sparkly pink piano fell on me," Emma admitted and the older woman blinked.

"Oh... well... at least you were being safe. That has to count for something," she said and stood up, wiping sweat from her brow. "How about some _hard_ lemonade? We can drink to embarrassing demises. Plus, I thought I might whip up an extra non sugary batch of the non-boozed variety and see if I can at least get a squeak out of Jianyu!"

Emma brushed off her pants and laughed, "You have a bit of a bad side, don't you?"

Joanne laughed at that. "Well, everyone does. It's all a matter of what we do with it."

* * *

It had been a long time since Neal had drawn anything. Sitting on a rock overlooking a large valley, he took out a sketch pad and a box of charcoal and pastels. Michael had suggested at the party that he take up a hobby, that if drawing was something he'd enjoyed in his youth maybe it was time to give it another go.

Neal tried. He swept the charcoal stick over the page, following the contours of the ridgelines, but it just didn't look right and it felt like more work than relaxation. Just like the other times when he was alive and tried to draw, thinking maybe he could get a job with his artistic skills. But all it did was bring back the horrific memories of Neverland, remind him of the mother who abandoned him for that dirty pirate and the father who never came for him.

Sighing, Neal flipped back through the pages. It was his old sketch pad from life - well, a replica of it - that included dozens of drawings of Emma that he'd done from memory in the weeks after leaving her. He'd done others of them in 'what if you didn't leave her' scenarios, where they were happy with a house, walking on the beach, playing with their future kids, but had tossed all those in the trash after finding out Emma as in prison, aware she'd never forgive him enough for any of that to ever happen.

Now it didn't matter. They could have a house and a beach in a place of happy endings, but their kid was still back on Earth, failed by the both of them just like their parents had failed them, and with the role models Henry had, he'd probably grow up to fork up with his kids too and the cycle would just keep on going.

In frustration, Neal chucked it over the side and watched it fall until it was out of sight.

This was supposed to be his happy ending, but it felt like the universe was pulling another cruel prank.

* * *

After a long day of gardening, Emma dragged herself back to her comparatively small but still bigger than anything she'd wanted house. She considered asking Janet to bring her some food when there was no sign of Neal in the kitchen. He did make really good grilled cheese, better than Granny's. Hook had always burned the edges, but he had seemed to be genuinely trying to please her.

But apparently he only wanted to please her because that pleased him, specifically in a sexual way. And the sex _was_ good. It was really _really_ good. It was passionate and rough and it felt like she completely lost and forget herself... the thing she'd been trying to do with all her one night stands, Emma realized, but hadn't managed.

After Neal and giving up Henry she hadn't wanted to feel connected, feel like she was her _real self_ or more than herself, she just hadn't wanted to feel anything connected to herself, to the person she was and the feelings she had in that motel room where, for one blissful hour, she lay in the arms of the man she loved and believed in her own happy ending.

That girl had died, though, long before Emma, bit by bit, she knew, in the back of a squad car, in a prison cell staring at a keychain, in a delivery room cuffed to a bed, in a broken car filled with bitter memories and every city she breezed through as she ran from the past and avoided seeing any kind of future where she was a good person, where she was loved.

Sighing, Emma opened the refrigerator - and taped to a bottle of soy milk was that forking postcard.

* * *

AN: Though not shown in the story, on _The Good Place_ , the character Tahani found Michael's holo cube and discovered the rankings list. Eleanor was sixth and she was second to last.

Next up: Emma has a meeting and Michael tries to fix the problem.


	8. Emma Swan Sells Sea Shells By The Sea

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fork.**

* * *

CHAPTER EIGHT

EMMA SWAN SELLS SEA SHELLS BY THE SEA SHORE

"No one is here," Emma told herself as she walked through the deserted town center at night. Thankfully, everyone seemed to be either home or at some stupid restaurant opening that she did feel kind of bad about not going to, but on the hand she hadn't wanted to ruin it for Neal when he had sounded really excited about everyone getting to eat the best meal they ever had recreated.

An owl hooted and Emma jumped and looked around. Then her stomach growled and she wondered if she should have gone, because this was stupid. Neal was right.

"It's just my subconscious forking with me."

"You wish."

Emma spun around, startled. "Jianyu!? Did you just-"

"Talk? Yes," said the Asian man.

"But I thought... you were a Buddhist Monk?"

"I did take a retreat once to a Buddhist monastery to learn about Earth," said Jianyu with a shrug. "But I'm not a monk. Also, you missed out on a sweet spread."

"Wait... you're an alien!?" Emma gasped, which drew an annoyed look.

"No, I'm from _your world_ , you idiot: The Enchanted Forest as you colonialist crackers call it," he told her. "Ignorant tourists are far more willing to give money to stereotypical quasi-religious old men for snake oil magic. Meaning fake magic, not actual magic potions created using oil from snakes like that crap you drank to find Aladdin. So I had to learn how to con Land Without Magic people. Made quit a killing too... 'til getting killed, obviously. Thanks again for giving a shirt what happened to me after escaping the mirror realm."

Emma's brain had shorted for a moment. "You're The Dragon! But... why aren't you old? And... you sound like you're from Queens. Was that all just a glamour?"

The Dragon rolled his eyes again. "Of course not. There wasn't enough magic to maintain a glamour and I'm not some immortal freak like Merlin or Pan. Have you noticed _anyone_ here over the age of sixty? Most of the people are thirty at the oldest. You are how you want to be, mostly when you were happiest. Which is why you don't look like a strung out heroine junkie with eczema."

"HEY!"

"Lady, you looked like shirt in life and even you know it," he scoffed. "Being bad was not good for your complexion. A stint as The Dark One left a permanent mark that wasn't going to keep you as creepily young looking as your mother or Regina. Though you _still_ don't look as good as before the whole savior thing was dumped on your lap. I suppose the stress of being found out is weighing heavily on you."

"OBVIOUSLY! AND YOUR LITTLE NOTES ARE NOT HELPING!"

The Dragon gave her a sour look. "Do you even care that our presence here is destroying The Afterlife? Because you know if it completely falls apart we cease to exist. And that's not bullshirt from a man-baby god, that's actual fact."

"That... that can really happen?"

"Yes, that can really happen!" The Dragon warned. "Michael is a lot more freaked out than he's let on. As a 'Buddhist Monk' he has confided in me that we are in potentially deep shirt!"

"Then why didn't you tell him you're not supposed to be here?" Emma asked.

"Because The Bad Place is a lot worse than nonexistence! They make everyone watch _The Bachelor_!"

Emma snorted. "My mom's way into that show. I know she gave Killian the idea to give me that rose for our first date. Ugh. She _is_ going to The Bad Place! Why is there no in between place for bad but not evil people like us!?"

The Dragon shrugged. "What fun is that? Who wants to design a place like... I dunno... Cincinnati?"

Frowning, Emma asked, "Hey, you never explained about your daughter? Are you Lily's father? Do you have like some race-changing magic ability along with the dragon thing? Cause she was totally hispanic but then grew up to be super white... and freakishly tall for her body mass at fourteen. Is she going to age into an old Chinese woman?"

The Dragon glowered at her. "I am beginning to wish I hadn't fought the Evil Queen and let her use me to burn you to death."

Emma grabbed The Dragon by his robes. "Well, you didn't, _Jianyu_. So now you're gonna tell me everything you know!"

* * *

The Dragon was regaling his ability to cheat death, which was definitely frowned upon here, when the front door opened and Neal entered, his suit in tatters.

"What happened!?" Emma gasped.

"A sinkhole opened up in the restaurant. So the building is condemned."

"It's no wonder," Jianyu spoke up, taking Neal by surprise, "what with you being a resident of the loft above."

"You talk?" Neal sputtered.

"He's not a monk," Emma groaned. "And he's not supposed to be here either. He's that crazy magic-peddling weirdo that your ex-fiancée tried to off in Hong Kong and somehow ended up in New York to _conveniently_ not help Henry get everyone back from The Land of Untold Stories and may or may not be Lily's somehow Chinese dragon daddy, but he won't tell me just to be really annoying!"

Shrugging, The Dragon said, "Your relatives are asholes. Everyone would have been better off if their stories had been paused. And you are fun to infuriate."

Neal frowned and asked, "Why would my presence have any kind of effect? I'm _supposed_ to be here. And you excused yourself to take a leak just before the thing opened up! Portal - sinkhole! Sounds like a connection there!"

"Please, you have more portal experience than I do," scoffed The Dragon. "And you're lying so Emma can stay here. Coincidence? I think not. Plus, you're her _soulmate_."

"No, that would be the savior who actually did all of the good things in my life memory DVR folder," corrected Emma, "that Michael thinks is Emma Swan from The Enchanted Forest. I guess I failed to mention that. Like Neal here failed to mention when we met the whole being from a land with magic thing."

Neal groaned. "Oh, really, we're going back to _that_? You would have thought I was crazy if I said I was born in The Enchanted Forest and lived in Neverland."

"Well, it would have been the truth, which I thought I was owed!"

"And yet Hookie-Wookie lied to you repeatedly and you just crawled right back into bed with him apologizing like _you_ were responsible for his betrayals of your trust," Neal pointed out. "Pathetic."

"I said I was sorry about Hook!'

"No you didn't!"

"Why do you care, anyway? You were on his ship for like a week and didn't even know he was your step dad! And you don't own me! You screwed up my life as much as he screwed up yours and then you got yourself killed using dark magic after all the benching and moaning you did about magic! You're the one who's pathetic!"

A smoke detector started to go off and then smoke began drifting out of the air vents.

"Oh no!" Emma gasped and ran upstairs to her bedroom, the others following.

The dreamcatcher was fully engulfed in flames again and had caught the drapes on fire and pretty much now the rest of her bedroom!

"Put it out, you buttheads!" The Dragon roared.

"How!? I don't have magic here!" Emma reminded.

"Obviously! Neither do I!"

"Do you guys hear something?" Neal asked of a sort of roaring sound.

They all hurried back downstairs and out the front door... to discover Emma's house was now on a very small island in the middle of a very big ocean.

Together they all groaned, "Fork."

* * *

Frozen yogurt had never tasted so good Emma decided as she dug into her cup. Sitting opposite her, Neal was less enthused with his cup while Michael was in the midst of a flustered apology.

"I don't know what happened. I was just trying to relocate the coastline. It wasn't supposed to strand you on a deserted island and burn your house down. And I have no idea where that kraken came from. A kraken! Obviously, that area is unstable. I should have put off the revision after the sinkhole, but I really thought that would set things right."

"It's... okay," Emma told him. "I mean, I appreciate that you were trying to... ah... make me happy."

"Yes, well, I failed miserably. But Joanne has kindly offered to let you both stay with her and Jianyu until I can put the ocean back where it belongs... though if this instability spreads you'll obviously have to evacuate."

"You still have no idea what caused any of this?" asked Emma anxiously.

"I still don't know for sure what imbalance caused the initial problem," Michael sighed. "I thought it was the ocean, but then Joanne suggested that it might just be you didn't have your dark potential until you died and weren't in balance yet. The pitfalls of only knowing the good and bad things people do after they're born, I suppose, not what their parents do them in utero to try cheating the system. But don't worry, you don't get penalized for that. They do. After all, you had to deal with taking on other people's darkness to balance yourself in life and that's much harder, and look what amazing things you still managed to do?"

"Yeah, amazing things," sighed Emma.

"Unlike _me_." Michael dug his spoon into his frozen yogurt. "Ugh. No Flavor is really terrible. But it's what I deserve."

"No, you don't," Emma insisted and handed him her cup. "Here. Netflix and Chill always makes me feel better."

* * *

"So, how often did you have shallow sex with people after watching reruns? Or was it just Hook?" Neal asked as they walked to Joanne's.

"How is that your business?" Emma grunted.

"Well, I am going along with pretending that you're my soulmate. And soulmates are supposed to know all about each other."

"What, is that some kind of law here?"

"No, but it's a law back home, right?" Neal challenged. "No one is entitled to keep any secrets from their one true love. Can't have any personal life. Gotta spill every detail, whether it's the death visions you're having or the meatloaf that gave you the runs. But, of course, only after a period of lying and subterfuge and spiteful retaliatory lying and then blanket forgiveness without any consequences."

"Are we _still_ on that?" growled Emma. "I got brainwashed by my parents and everyone and that stupid book, okay! I'm trying to be better now!"

"Like you were after prison?"

"Where I wouldn't have ended up if you hadn't trusted August," Emma reminded. "And I made a stupid mistake _hoping_ you'd be waiting for me in Tallahassee and that forked up the next ten years of my life! After everything I still hoped you would be there with an explanation! But you weren't! So what did I have to be better for? I had no money, no boyfriend, had to _give up my kid_ and I was running from the forking law just because I was stupid enough to believe that just maybe you hadn't betrayed me!"

Neal winced and kicked at a sea shell that had washed up on the road. "How many times do I have to say 'I'm sorry' for it to matter?"

"I could ask you the same thing," Emma shot back. "I think we both know the answer."

"This isn't going to work," Neal agreed and let out a weary sigh. "Before I died, I wanted it to. More than anything I wanted to be able to make up for that and get a second chance with you. And a first chance with Henry. But..."

"The person you were in love with didn't exist anymore," Emma nodded, her expression falling. "You're still the same guy, despite all the shirt you've been through. Maybe that's a Good Place people thing. No matter what people here get thrown at them, they don't let it... corrupt them.

"But I'm not that kind of person," Emma grimaced. "I took in all those other people's darkness, I let it make me dark, I even liked it sometimes, and the rest of the time I mostly didn't give a fork that I was being selfish and acting like a jerk.

"The Emma who fell in love with you, she would hate me," Emma sadly realized. "She wouldn't want you to be with me either. She'd probably say I should just confess and go to The Bad Place."

"We might never have gotten Tallahassee, but we'll always have Portland," Neal shrugged. "Convenience stores hot-dogs and Funyons-"

"And driving out of town to look up at the stars," Emma remembered, "pretending we were just camping. I accidentally squirted my mustard packet on you that one time."

"And you kissed me," Neal remembered and smiled sadly. "That was the best meal I ever had, you know? It was the first time I'd felt truly happy in longer than I could remember."

"Me too," Emma sniffled.

* * *

With no jobs in The Good Place, Emma found herself wandering aimlessly the next day. She was avoiding running into The Dragon. And Neal. And also Joanne even though she seemed nice enough, like a kind of raunchy aunt.

Eventually, Emma wandered her way to Michael's office, not really by any conscious decision. Probably her guilt had sent her there, maybe to confess, but before she could finish debating that, the Architect welcomed her into his office.

"Emma, how fortuitous. I was just going to see if you could stop over to discuss something."

"Um... really?"

"Yes, well, Joanne mentioned that you were the sheriff of your town back on Earth and that seemed like the perfect background to help with this investigation," Michael explained. "If you're willing, of course."

Emma pushed down her panic. Investigating the cause that she knew was her and trying to pin it on something or someone else? Well, there was The Dragon. She still wasn't sure how _he_ ended up here. She could investigate _that_ she supposed... "Um... yeah... cool."

"Great! Have a seat!"

Emma sat and Michael pulled back some curtains she hadn't even noticed to reveal a wall that was covered in names and dates and stuck with pins and connected with pieces of string.

"Now," the Architect began pointing to the center of the crazy person web, "I have a new theory that this glitch all started with The Temporal Paradox Incident."

"Temporal Paradox Incident?"

"That's what we Architects call the time travel rift that altered the course of history. I believe I alluded it to previously," explained Michael. "That moment created an entirely new timeline that effectively erased the original one. For instance, in the original timeline of your world, Cinderella was cursed along with her stepmother and stepsisters. But in the new timeline, her stepmother dragged one of her sisters through a portal to The Land of Untold Stories months before the Curse was cast and her other step sister met and married Prince Thomas' footman who was actually supposed to marry a woman who ended up killed by some trolls that were supposed to have been turned to bugs and squashed by Snow White three days earlier.

"And that's just the tip of the iceberg!" he groaned. "Dozens of lives were ruined and thousands more were effected in some way that caused people to make different choices or face different events, good or bad, that changed their karma. We had to rewrite entire neighborhoods! It's no wonder things are going haywire here! Some... alteration must not have been accounted for, some paradox that's causing this! But it could be any one of millions of things down to someone stepping or not stepping on an ant at a specific point in time meaning that a grain of sand is now out of place!"

Sitting back, slumping in his chair, Michael lamented, "My superior thought I should just scrap my entire design after the TPI. There were too many new variables. But like the naive young fool of two thousand and twenty-eight that I am, I was certain I had accounted for everything!"

"You started your apprentice ship when you were one thousand seven hundred... and something?" Emma asked while internalizing that she'd apparently ruined so many lives by falling down a portal that probably only Hitler had a worse score.

"I was a late bloomer," said Michael. "But that's not important. I was obviously wrong. So now we just need to find the paradox that hasn't been fixed. We'll start with the sea shells." He dumped a jar of them onto the desk. "Do any of these look suspicious to you?"

"Um..." Emma picked up a shell. "Can sea shells look suspicious?"

The Architect sighed. "Good point. At this rate, this method will never work!"

"Yeah, probably not," agreed Emma. "But your, ah, map thingie worked, right? I mean, it gave you a place to start."

Michael's eyes lit up. "Yes! Of course! You're brilliant, Emma! We'll examine each incident, the people involved, the people affected, and Janet can help analyze each one for any possible relation and defect!"

Hiding a wince, Emma replied, "Glad I could help, Boss."

* * *

They spent the day going over lists with Janet. All the people present when giant things terrorized town. Everyone there when it rained trash. Everyone around when a sink hole at Neal's building.

Thankfully, Michael didn't count the beach thing, since that was his own meddling.

"I have a question," asked Emma after Janet had finished providing a list of people at the restaurant while they sat at the Frozen Yogurt place across the street, "where do non-human people go? I mean, like that guy Gus Gus who was a mouse and Pinocchio who was a puppet."

Janet answered, "Gus Gus was not born a non-human. He was Gus Gustaverson from Hamlin in The Frontlands region of The Enchanted Forest. He was cursed by a warlock to become a mouse after his parents failed to pay their taxes to the regional duke. Gus escaped Hamlin in the luggage of a couple staying at a local inn and came to live with Cinderella and her family up to the point of the Dark Curse was cast, which transported everyone to a world where animal curse forms were not maintained and where he was axe-murdered by King George in the Land Without Magic year 2012. Gus Gustaverson is currently living in Neighborhood 12358V."

"Huh. And Pinocchio?"

"Pinocchio is not a real sentient being. He would cease to exist."

Emma coughed on her frozen yogurt. "Seriously?"

"Oh, yes," nodded Michael. "He's even less real than Janet, a magical construct that behaves like the real thing in as much as its original components can mimic such behavior, but has no soul and so is incapable of love or hate. Which is ironic, I suppose, since he was carved from the wood of a magical tree, a seed that was germinated by the magical true love spark of two soulmates exchanging epithelial cells. Then again, maybe not so ironic given the prevalence of such trees being fertilized by the rotting corpse of some poor sadistic schmuck killed by the true lovers. Sometimes that bad karmic magic ends up destroying the true love spark magic and then you get an evil magical tree that's useless for protection spells but still has the quasi-sentience-creating magic to cobble together a facsimile of a human being. I would imagine that the dead guy in Pinocchio's origin story liked to steal, drink, gamble, and visit whore houses."

"That is correct!" Janet informed. "Evil magic trees are rare and can be used to do great harm. Thankfully, the most recent evil magic tree created when Snow White and Prince Charming first touched over the body of an assassin he had just brutally stabbed was destroyed by the Evil Queen Remnant so it was never able to grow beyond the sapling stage. It would have contained great dark magical power, what with neither of the true love couple feeling any remorse for the slaying."

"Yes, at least that was avoided," Michael agreed. "All these 'true love saplings' are really bullshirt to make fairy wands. It's all self-serving magic. Serves Ruel Ghorm right for meddling to ensure soulmates met in life to try and create a super powerful tree for a super powerful wand, probably to counter Merlin's that his apprentice was using, only to get an evil and thus useless to her tree instead!"

"Yeah, serves her right," winced Emma as yet another beautiful true love moment between her parents was torn to shreds, undermining yet more of the fairy tale foundation she'd rebuilt her obviously forked-up morality on.

"If only someone had destroyed that other tree," sighed Michael. "Or Rue had destroyed Pinocchio's body instead of rebooting him to a more primitive, childlike, version with her primitive fairy magic. He's likely to suffer a catastrophic system failure like Janet 4.0 and try to murder everyone in Storybrooke!"

"Wait... did you say _'Rue_ '?" Emma asked.

"We... um... knew each other a long time ago."

"Did you two date!?" Emma gasped.

"Not... exactly."

"So, you were just hooking up?"

Michael gave her an annoyed look and admitted, "She bullied me when we were children, all right? Or the equivalent of children for eternal quasi-incorporeal beings. She was _horrible_. She was supposed to be assigned a position in The Bad Place when Zeus dropped out to make his own unsanctioned afterlifes and somehow she found a loophole with her sister to escape to your world. But then she got in a fight over who would masquerade as the Ultimate Good and yadda yadda yadda her sister ended up with a blackened heart, stealing babies. But they're both just _horrible_ immortal beings.

"I don't know about you, but I don't consider anything good about slave labor, cult level brainwashing, violent suppression of unionization, peddling magic like drugs, and using humans like pawns to help her smite whatever other immortal she's got a beef with at the time. No one could ever prove it, but there's suspicion that Rue and her sister were in league with Zeus and agreed to be his agents on Earth, or that magical part of it, anyway, to ensure stories got written in those books and in a way that favored populating whatever part of his afterlives he wanted certain people to end up in for entertainment purposes. He makes Trevor seem like a bunny rabbit."

"Trevor?"

"My counterpart in The Bad Place. He runs Bad Place Neighborhood 12358W."

Shrugging, Michael concluded, "I wouldn't put anything past that uppity bench who'd prefer if everyone licked the bottoms of her shoes on the occasions she had to suffer the disgrace of taking corporeal form. Didn't you say she put you in some magical wardrobe?"

"Ah, yeah," Emma hesitantly nodded, "with Pinocchio. She lied to my parents that only one person could go in it because she made a back alley deal with Geppetto to send his puppet kid with me and my pregnant mother, only I was born before they could use it, so I got stuck with him. He basically abandoned me at an orphanage and stole the groundskeeper's money. Then later tracked me down to steal _my_ money. Then _later_ tracked me down to try and get me to break that stupid curse just to keep him from turning to wood... between trying to get me to sleep with him, using my kid as bait, and impersonating my ex-lover to blackmail his father. Also, I'm pretty sure he wanted to fork me."

Wincing, Emma realized, "Man, he was _such_ a douche! Why did I ever think he could be my friend?"

"Well, wanting to fit in can be blinding," sighed Michael. "I wanted to fit in with Zeus' crowd. I was a few years behind those guys. An undergraduate, you see. If I had been apprenticing already, who knows what might have happened? I might have been swept up in all their bigoted nonsense and be designing orgy retreats in Elyssium or torture chambers in Tartarus. Or worse, bath houses at Mt. Olympus... which seem to be a combination of both of those.

"Anyway, my point is that when you really want to be included by people that you think are doing good, you can be blinded into not seeing that they're really doing bad and aren't even good people at all," said Michael. "I was just lucky that they all thought I was an 'artsy hipster nerd poopy pants' so no matter what I thought, they left me out of their plans. Of course, the faculty was a bit suspicious and my apprenticeship application was passed over again and again and again on various technicalities that required appealing to Sean. But I finally got to become an Architect _and_ I got to do a lot more studying on my own that wouldn't have been included in the cirrocumuli. So, it all worked out," he concluded with forced optimism.

"Until the morning after you officially opened the Neighborhood and everything went to shirt," interrupted Janet.

"Yes, thank you, Janet," Michael scowled. "How about we call it a day?"

* * *

"I thought August was my friend," sighed Emma as she sat with Neal in Joanne's garden, "and he was just... a magical android like Janet!"

Well, technically, Neal had been out star-charting and she'd interrupted his star-charting to complain about her day.

"You thought Hook was your friend and he just wanted in your pants because what he perceived as your goodness made him feel better about himself," Neal reminded, "by sucking out all of your goodness. Seriously, Emma, you suck flying monkey balls at finding out if someone's got the qualities required for friendship. Or romance. Or motherhood. Or-"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it!" she snapped. "I suck as a person. I'm a bad everything and I'm bad at picking the right people to hang out with. Tell me something you haven't been telling me for the past two weeks!"

"You prematurely aged?"

Emma glared at him. "Really? Do want another garbage storm? You're the one with gray hair!"

"I was in arrested development for a couple hundred years and lost what I _thought_ was the love of my life to her destiny," Neal shot back. "I was overdue.

"Seriously, Emma, you aged like ten years in two," he told her. "I've got the evidence on video. I guess 'love' blinded the two of you that the closer you got, and the less sleazy he tried to look, the more _you_ looked like a terminal cancer patient. Like some kind of Dorian Gray thing with skankiness. Maybe with magic you wear your bad karma on the outside... though it doesn't explain why you didn't look creepy as fork as the Dark One."

"Yeah, I don't really get that either," mused Emma. "I mean, Hook didn't look _any_ different. I'm guessing it must be some TPI stuff."

"TPI?"

"Temporal Paradox Incident," shrugged Emma. "That thing where I went back in time and forked everything up and Michael doesn't know it was me who did that. It rewrote reality or something and they had to redesign neighborhoods to account for people dying or not dying at the wrong times in the new timeline or growing up different and being different people with different likes and dislikes and experiences and whatever."

"So, you forked up the universe."

"Basically."

"That has to be serious negative points."

"I didn't do it on purpose like Zeus!" Emma complained. "I just wanted to stop that stupid portal. Or stop Zelena from killing Eva in the past. I wanted to keep it the same so paradox stuff _wouldn't_ happen. I just... forgot I didn't have magic and had no way to really do any of that until it was too late. But my intentions were good!"

"Preserving temporal integrity wasn't your reason for not trying to bring me back in an altered timeline," Neal pointed out. "You wanted me to stay a 'dead hero' because you just didn't want me complicating your life! So instead you lied to my father and then went right back around a few months later and went to The Underworld to try and keep Hook from being the 'dead hero' he _actually wanted to be_ , just because you couldn't live without your fork boy. And you dragged Henry with you! And I've had to watch as that miserable excuse for a human being has corrupted my kid, turned him into a sexist, entitled little shirt who doesn't give a crap about justice."

Neal laughed bitterly and shook his head. "Do you think it feels good watching the guy who ruined my family, who left me with a child abuser, lie to my kid about all the stuff he taught me, all the times he tried and failed to save me, spin some self-centered crap that insinuating himself into Henry's family was somehow _not destroying a family again like he did by killing his old man_ like he's erased his own memory _of destroying my family with my mother_ and _making a contest out of getting into the mother of my child's pants to spite me so we didn't even get to forking talk because he was always there being a jackash_!?"

"No, it probably doesn't," Emma conceded, her expression falling.

"I've had to watch _my son_ replace me with someone who betrayed me on multiple occasions," Neal told her. "I've had to watch the woman I loved, that I died trying to get back to, be so totally okay with it that you encouraged it either by trying to shove them together or being so neglectful of Henry that the only way he had to even get a hug out of you was to join in you jumping in Hook's arms first, like he was your reason to live and everyone else was just extras in your damn epic romance."

"You think I don't know that?" Emma cried. "Henry _hates_ me! He once said he wondered if he shouldn't have ever found me because he made me a savior that messed up my life. But now he wishes he never found me because I messed up _his_ life! He blames _me_ for you dying. For Zelena never being locked up. For no one helping your dad after she locked him up. For the Dark One thing that might not have happened if everyone had helped him find another way. For the mess with the Evil Queen. The list goes on! I was a horrible savior. I was an even worse mother. I failed Henry on both counts. And now he _is_ a sexist, entitled little shirt, the kind of creep I hated when I was that age, but no one notices or cares, because that's apparently what our family is made up of, so he's either going to end up Zeus' bench when he dies or go to The Bad Place and be tortured for eternity!"

Emma wiped the tears from her eyes and concluded, "Of all the ways I've royally forked up in my life, that's the one I regret the most. I gave our son up to have his best chance... and then I ruined it by coming back into his life."

Neal sighed and took a seat beside her. "Maybe not. Like you said, our family is full of asholes. Even if you'd left before all the other stuff happened, they'd probably have messed him up the same."

"I should have taken Henry back to New York," Emma sniffed. "I let Hook twist your words about home into making me feel guilty for leaving everyone else, like him, instead of focusing on what was best for Henry. He'd never have become The Author. He could have gotten to know you, even if it was just through your stuff back in New York. At least he'd have grown up grounded in reality instead of that messed up one where half the time stuff has no consequences for no reason and good people die and bad people get the rewards they were supposed to get for being good and people are only supposed to have hope when their lives suck the most, which doesn't even make sense, because who is that forking well adjusted that they can have hope no matter how much the universe hates them?"

Emma sniffed again and lamented, "I just wanted Henry to turn out better than I did. I wanted him to grow up right, with actual values and opportunities. Instead he got backwards morals and enslavement to a magic pen. And there's nothing I can do to fix it."

"He could have gotten those same backwards morals in the world outside Storybrooke," Neal told her. "I mean, half the country just voted for a guy that exemplifies all the worst qualities of the worst people in the Enchanted Forest in the same way our dumb fork citizenry just shrug off the bad guy's crimes."

Wincing, Emma muttered, "Yeah, about that. Janet said my time travel thing contributed to Trump winning the election..."

Neal gave her a look. "Seriously? You screwed over Then Enchanted Forest _and_ The United States of America!?"

"It wasn't on purpose!" Emma cried.

"COMMUNITY MEETING!" Michael's voice came on from... somewhere. "I THINK I KNOW HOW TO FIX IT!"

* * *

AN: I wanted to wait for The Dragon episode to post this and made a few allusions to tonight's episode. And, of course, the recent presidential election. The timeline of OUAT is currently Fall 2013, apparently, even though it makes no chronological sense for that much time to have passed unless they were in The Underworld all summer. So either Emma died after Trump's election (but I don't see how the show would fit in three years without Emma married in a castle having pirate babies) or because time moves differently between The Good Place and Earth it happened there after she died but she learned about it. I just had to fit that in as something Emma caused to stain her record!

Next up: Emma's guilt gets the best of her.


	9. The Rose Ceremony

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fork.**

* * *

CHAPTER NINE

THE ROSE CEREMONY

Needless to say, Michael had not fixed it - though he intended to do so by leaving much to everyone's shock. Apparently, Architects were not meant to live in their neighborhoods, but he was just so fascinated by humans that he wanted to experience afterlife from their point of view.

Part of Emma wanted to believe that his leaving would fix everything and no one but Neal and The Dragon and Janet would ever know the truth about her. But the bigger part knew that was false hope. Of course, the biggest part felt horribly guilty because Michael was probably the nicest immortal deity-like-whatever that anyone truly good person could hope to have looking out for their happy ending and he obviously had been enjoying living here as much as or even more than the people he designed it specifically for.

So Emma wasn't much feeling the retirement party mood. Neither was Michael who finally put a damper on Joanne's festive atmosphere.

"I'm sorry. Everyone. Please," he announced, "this isn't a day for celebration. Retirement for Architects isn't the same as it is on Earth."

"You don't get to hike up your pants, play golf, and complain about the government full time?" Emma asked.

"No. The Eternal Shriek is far worse torture than anything experienced in The Bad Place. My soul will be disintegrated and each molecule will be placed on the surface of a different burning sun. And then my essence will be scooped out of my body with a flaming ladle and poured over hot diamonds... and then what's left of my body will be endlessly beaten with a titanium rod like a-" He pointed to the Papier Mâché animal hanging from the ceiling.

"Piñata," grimaced Joanne.

"But you have the string around my waist. Instead it will definitely be around my genitals."

While everyone gaped, Michael apologized again. "I'm sorry. That was perhaps too graphic. It doesn't matter now. Soon the train will be here and Janet will take me to... meet my maker as it were."

"Janet is taking you by train?" Neal asked, a bit confused.

"Train is the only way to come and go from neighborhoods and only Janet can conduct it," Michael explained before promptly leaving.

* * *

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Emma asked when she gathered with Neal and The Dragon in another room.

"That the train thing is an obvious rip-off of Harry Potter?" said The Dragon.

"No! That we have to kill Janet!"

Neal blinked. "Wait, what!?"

"She's the only one that can conduct the train!"

"Is it possible to even kill her? She's a magic robot," Neal pointed out.

"Janet!" The Dragon called out and she appeared with a 'bing'. "Can you die?"

"I cannot die," she cheerfully answered. "I am routinely upgraded, however. There have been 25 generations of Janets."

"Okay," Emma interjected, "but Michael said that the fourth one suffered some catastrophic system failure."

"That is correct. Janet 4.0 inadvertently uploaded an update meant for Bad Janet which resulted in a threat to The Good Place. As a result a kill switch has since been placed in a remote area of every neighborhood in case of future malfunctions that could harm the residents."

"Great! Take us there!"

Before Neal could object, they were transported to beach much like the one near what used to be Emma's house but miles and miles from anywhere.

"Just so you know," said Janet, "I am programed to plead for my life. It's not real. I am not human. I cannot die."

"Great," Emma repeated and made to slap the big red buzzer.

"WAIT!" Janet shouted. "DON'T KILL ME!"

Emma hesitated and the helper-bot reiterated, "That was not real. It's just my programing. I cannot die."

Emma tried again, and this time Janet pulled out a photograph while weeping, "DON'T DO THIS! I HAVE THREE KIDS! THEY NEED THEIR MOTHER!"

Again Emma hesitated.

The Dragon, however, did not. He lunged for the button. Neal tried to stop him, but he tripped up in the fake monk's robes and fell on the button himself.

Janet collapsed.

There was a moment of shocked silence.

And then one of those emergency video screens appeared in the sky featuring Janet, calmly announcing, "Attention. I have been murdered. Attention. I have been murdered..."

"Oh," groaned Emma.

"Fork," concluded Neal.

* * *

Janet's funeral at the town commons was a miserable affair made worse by the now annoying "I have been murdered" announcement that had been going on constantly for hours - until Janet rebooted toward the end of the funeral.

Unfortunately, Janet 26.0 was dumber than the dumbest of Emma's forebears and tried to eat the floral arrangements next to her coffin.

"Well, this is a setback," Michael began, while Janet was petting a fern and calling it 'nice kitty', "but it will only delay the inevitable. As soon as Janet has rebooted enough information to drive the train, I will be on my way. Then things will get back to normal. I am very sorry that I failed you all. And... Janet."

"Wait!" Emma called out, before he could leave. "You can't go. It's not your fault! It's mine!"

Everyone looked at her in confusion. Well, everyone but Neal who grimaced and 'Jianyu' who was sleeping.

"I don't belong here," she explained. "I'm supposed to be in The Bad Place."

* * *

The "DON'T WORRY. EVERYTHING IS FINE" sign on the green wall was mocking Emma as she waited for Michael to call her into his office.

She did so feeling like dog with a tail between her legs.

"So... what happens now?" Emma asked.

"Well," Michael pulled out some papers, "normally, I would have Janet simply pull up your comprehensive file-"

"I found Emma's file!" Janet called and scampered over to hand Michael... a cactus.

"That's still a cactus," he sighed.

"No, it's Emma Swan's file."

"No, it's a cactus!" Michael insisted, trying not to get angry with the child-like Janet. "Why don't you get Emma a glass of water?"

"Of course!" Janet walked around the table to hand Emma a cactus. Then exclaimed, "Oh, did you want lemon with that?" She produced yet another cactus. "Oh, wait I forgot the ice-"

"It's fine," sighed Emma, taking the two cacti.

"Why don't you go back to, um, petting that kitty, Janet," Michael instructed, sending Janet over to pet a potted parlor palm.

To Emma he explained, "She's been stuck in a cactus loop ever since I made the mistake of mentioning that you had lived in Phoenix to help jog her memory banks."

Trying to smile, Michele continued, "Which means we'll have to sort this out ourselves. So, this is a quick litmus test, a hand full of questions designed to determine if you are fundamentally good or bad."

"Okay, shoot," Emma agreed, feeling like she was having the worst job interview ever.

"Have you ever committed a serious crime such as murder, sexual harassment, arson or otherwise?"

"No."

"Did you ever have a vanity license plate like 'MAMAZ BMW', 'LEXUS4LIZ', or 'B00BGUY'?"

"Does it count if a car I stole already had one?" asked Emma. "And I stole them over non vanity plate cars because people who have vanity plates are douchebags?"

"I suppose that cancels out the crime karma," grimaced Michael before asking, "Did you ever reheat fish in an office microwave?"

"I never worked in an office. Also. Gross."

"Have you paid money to hear music performed by California funk rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers?"

"Nope. I snuck into a concert once to avoid the cops. I had this parol violation, see-"

"Of course you did," he sighed and continued before she could, "Did you ever take off shoes and socks on a commercial airline?"

"No, gross! Who would do that?"

"People who go to The Bad Place, Emma! That's the point! And unless I can find a compelling reason to keep you here, you will spend eternity with murderers and rapists and people who take their shoes and socks off on commercial airlines!"

Emma sighed and slumped in her seat.

* * *

"This is just awful!" Joanne complained as she sat in the waiting room with Jianyu and Baelfire. "I mean, I'm not surprised that meeting her mother sucked out any remaining goodness that Emma had and turned her onto a path of selfish hypocrisy. But still, it's _awful_. She lied to all of us! And she's probably destroyed poor Michael's career... not to mention his sanity!"

"It's not her fault she ended up here by mistake," Neal reminded while feeling guilty about Janet. He never should have gone along with Emma's plan! And what was the deal with The Dragon!? "And would you want to go to The Bad Place? Yeah, she's done some bad stuff, and some people have died because of her actions or inactions, and sure there was the time travel thing that screwed up the Universe, but she was never trying to be intentionally malicious or homicidal. I mean, even as the Dark One she was basically a love-sick emo teenage loser. And, okay, covering up murder for her boyfriend is pretty bad, but the only person she actually ever killed was a serial killer."

"Since when did you hop on the Emma Train?" Joanne griped. "I thought you were still pissed off at her for jumping into bed with your stepfather a few weeks after you kicked it."

"I AM!" Neal snapped. "I just don't think Emma deserves to go to The Bad Place!"

"Well, I do," Joanne huffed, crossing her arms. "And I'm sure Jianyu agrees with me. Right Jianyu?"

The fake monk smiled at her and Neal scowled at the traitorous sorcerer. This whole situation sucked. He was mad at Emma for a lot for a lot of things, sure. A lot A LOT. But she didn't deserve to be stuck in the same place as Hitler.

* * *

"And finally a multi-part question," Michael wound down the test. "Did you ever appear on the American television program _The Bachelor_ or it's companion shows _The Bachelorette_ and _Bachelor In Paradise_ , or post on any social media that you were emotionally invested in any of the relationships the contestants were pursuing."

"Does liking my mom's Facebook post as a way to pretend I care without having to talk to her in person about it and how she ghost-wrote my first date with my kid's step grandfather using inspiration from her love of _The Bachelor_ count?" Emma asked.

"Was there a rose involved?"

"Real or emoji?"

"Either."

"Both," Emma grumbled. "But I wasn't emotionally invested in either."

There was a buzzing sound from Michael's desk drawer and he pulled out a red glowing cube.

"Oh, yes, the lie detector cube. I forgot that was in there. So, you were saying about the 'neither was genuine'?"

Emma groaned. "Fine, I was only emotionally invested in my kid's step grandfather, not _The Bachelor_!"

"Which," sighed Michael, "which not technically incest is still really disgusting and shows rather blatant disregard for both acceptable social norms and your son's emotional well-being."

Emma sighed and hung her head. "I know. I know I screwed up. I never should have kissed Hook in Neverland. I never should have dressed up like I was a cast member in _Grease_ and gone out on that date with him, but he had three hundred years of learning how to emotionally and psychologically manipulate vulnerable women he couldn't get drunk to sleep with him, and I was really messed up, okay? Two guys I had loved just died and another one just the year before and I didn't want to deal with that pain or what it meant that my lovers kept biting the dust. Or the whole being The Savior crap! I just wanted to feel normal!

"So I got dressed up all girlie for the first time in forever for a guy who was into me," Emma defended her actions. "And no guy ever brought me flowers before, accept for when I was faking them out on Tinder to collect a bounty. I mean, Neal picked some dandelions once, but they were wilted and smashed and half gone to seed and got that white goo all over my hands and I told him it was the lamest attempt at being romantic ever. Which maybe it was. But I still thought it was sweet and I actually kept some of the stupid seeds."

The cub pinged a truthful blue.

Emma sighed. "I get it. I turned into a really shallow person. I stopped appreciating all the stuff that mattered because it was easier to go along with a new fairy tale worldview where there were no real consquences and if everything was some crazy magical whatever, then it was easy to forget to that innocent people were really dying and the how didn't make the people responsible any less bad. I should have been helping getting justice for their victims, not helping them whitewash their crimes and get happy endings. I completely screwed up my destiny. I know that means I'm doomed."

Michael folded his hands on the desk and answered, "No, not necessarily. You actually did well on the test, Emma. Some of your answers revealed more than I wanted to know, but you're not a complete douchebag."

"So, you really think there's a chance that I could stay?" Emma asked, daring to hope.

"There's an incoming transmission!" Janet suddenly announced.

"What is it?"

Janet handed Michael yet another cactus.

"Oh, hang it," Michael groaned and walked over to the wall, pressing his hand against it.

A TV screen appeared with a weasley looking man.

"Hey, dorks! Guess what? You have one of our ding-dongs! We're on our way to collect! Peace out, losers!"

The screen vanished and Michael groaned. "Oh, I hate that guy!"

Before Emma could comment, the office door opened and 'that guy' entered, looking arrogant and in a hurry.

"Hey, Dweb. This my soul?"

"Um... yes... this is... Emma Swan," Michael croaked out. "Emma... this is Trevor."

"Michael's much cooler counterpart! You like bad boys, right? And I understand you were totally into your boyfriend's emotional abuse too! We should get along great!" he crowed and slapped Emma on the back. "Oh, come, you should smile more, sweetheart, you have such a pretty face! Well, prettier now that you're dead and channeling a better looking version of you. I managed to find some life memories of dead people you knew, and man, you really went down hill! I mean, I've seen heroine addicted actresses with better head shots!"

Emma glared while Michael frowned in disapproval and disgust.

"Here," Trevor said, handing Michael a folder. "I believe this file belongs to you."

Turning to Emma he produced a red rose. "And _this_ is for you! I chose you to be the object of my torture for all of eternity! Awesome, right?"

Michael looked over the folder's contents, reading aloud. "Emma Swan. Born in The Enchanted Forest to Snow White and Prince Charming. Relocated to The Land Without Magic-"

"Which really does have magic. Stupid name, obviously," snorted Trevor.

"Grew up in the Foster System. Ran away. Stole cars. Arrested at seventeen for possession of stolen goods. Served eleven months in prison in Phoenix. Broke parole. Was responsible for the death of the bountyhunter attempting to bring her in. Made said bountyhunter's daughter cry by telling her that her mother was dead and then asked to buy a jacket while the girl was crying her eyes out. Slept with three 'deadbeats' before handing them over to authorities for the bounty which she used to afford expensive high-rise apartments, designer leather jackets, and Prada shoes. Kidnapped her own son that she gave up for adoption after thinking he was crazy. Stabbed a woman with a sword-"

"She was a dragon. I didn't know she was a woman. I thought she was bad," Emma tried to defend to herself. "Not screwed over by my parents and Regina and trapped down there. I was being manipulated by Rumplestiltskin."

" _You were the Dark One_!?" Michael continued, reading, shocked. " _And_ you caused the TPI!"

"By accident! And I was trying to keep the Dark One darkness from turning Regina into the Dark One. She would have been a badass Dark One!"

"True, and you were lame," nodded Trevor, telling Michael. "She was _the worst_ Dark One in history. All she did was mope about her boyfriend problems while insulting David Bowie and Blondie with her bad fashion.

"Incidentally, David Bowie is really looking forward to punching you in the tits for that," Trevor told Emma.

"Emma," Michael lamented over her very long file, "this is really bad. I'm sorry, but... I don't know how I can keep you here. You... you belong in The Bad Place."

All Emma could do was nod and follow Trevor into the waiting room where her sort of friends were standing opposite a group of nerdowells. One of them, she recognized.

"Isaac!?"

The former Author glowered at her. "Savior! Can't wait to come up with more bad days for you!"

"He's a new groupie I poached when Hades kicked it and Zeus was too busy resurrecting that rapey pirate," Trevor explained to Michael. "Very enthusiastic. I mean, I tortured him for a few years, but he just kept coming up with even better badly written possibilities for the few souls from _their world_ that get past Zeus' dragnet that I couldn't resist."

"So you can get promoted out of being tortured?" Emma asked.

"Yeah, sure. I had to castrate him first, of course. We strung him up like a piñana by his-"

"We get the nauseating picture," sighed Michael and he addressed Neal, Joanne, and Jianyu. "Everyone, as you may have guessed, this is Trevor. He's hear to escort Emma to The Bad Place."

"So chop chop, losers! We have to get back before _The Bachelor_. I don't want to miss the rose ceremony!"

With a snap of his fingers, they were all standing by a steam engine.

Neal walked up to Emma, conflicted. "I'm sorry it turned out like this. I never wanted you to go to The Bad Place."

"I know," Emma sniffed. "I never wanted you to think I didn't love you. I just... I'm kind of damaged and I don't know how to accept affection."

"Okay," Trevor cut her off, "now you're just plagiarizing Sara Michelle Geller talking about Buffy banging that vampire who tried to rape her, and her character got some self-awareness before she died... or after she died and came back, but the point is, no time for sappy good-byes! You should have thought of that when you had the chance before, instead of spending it flirting with the pirate. Which reminds me, I captain quite a ship! How do you feel about being keel-hauled?"

Without further ado, Emma was surrounded by Trevor's goons, including a creepily-smiling Isaac, and led onto the train.

The demonic Architect took the intercom and gleefully began, "This is the 8:15 to The Bad Place making literally thousands of stops for no reason. It's hot in here and it will get one degree hotter every time you think about how hot it is - there, you just did!"

Emma glared.

"There is a dining car at the back of the train that serves only room temperature Manhattan clam chowder and it's closed," Trevor concluded and raised his arm as the train began to move, "Choo choo! All aboard for Hell, dummies!"

* * *

"We can't let this happen!" Neal pleaded on the platform with a distraught Michael. "I know Emma's screwed up a lot in her life, but we can't leave her with those asholes. I mean, that Isaac guy is a total sadist and Trevor might think he's a fangirl, but and I don't think he's big on rules or not being the one in the spotlight."

"Baelfire's right," nodded Joanne, "he's giving off total Peter Pettigrew vibes. I mean, not that I forgive Emma or anything, because I don't. But I asked Janet about The Authors before she was... well... murdered since Emma said her son was the latest one. Somehow Isaac tricked them all into releasing him from The Book and he conned Baelfire's dying father into getting him the tools to use to write everyone into his very badly written fanfiction version of their stories. He died while trying to kill Henry for interfering, which is how Henry became The Author. He hates Emma. He'll make her time in The Bad Place far more terrible than she deserves., and while I don't actually feel too badly about that, what if he's planning a coupe? What if he's really a mole working for Zeus?"

"Oh, that would be bad. A mortal in charge of The Bad Place? And one who can't even write well?" Michael shuddered. "But what can we do? Emma _belongs_ there? And we have no proof that this Isaac fellow is a mole."

Jianyu interrupted, throwing an apple at the side of the train, specifically at a window where an unfamiliar woman had her face pressed to the glass.

"Who is that?" asked Joanne as Isaac appeared, pulling her away from the window.

Neal had a sudden realization. "That's the Real Emma!"

Michael gasped. "Well, that does it!"

He ran onto the train before it could leave the station. "Stop this train! We demand our Emma!"

Trevor groaned. "Oh, fork!"

* * *

AN: Chunks of the dialogue from Michael's retirement party and the karma test were taken verbatim from _The Good Place_. I intended to go on hiatus after 9 chapters, but I wasn't able to fit all of the show's "Chapter 9" events into one chapter, so there will be a Chapter 10 to close things out before this story goes on a holiday break.

Next up: The other Emma Swan.


	10. The Real Emma Swan

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fork.**

 **Note to Mir: I'm actually confused about the "keep two Emmas" thing, or I should say "keep two Eleanors" thing. It was a glaring plothole on the show that Real Eleanor was brought on the train to The Good Place by Trevor yet was never mentioned until the train was leaving to take Fake Eleanor to The Bad Place and Michael demanded they stop. Only then did Trevor reveal Real Eleanor to shock them/throw a wrench in their plan to keep Fake Eleanor, because she was taking Real Eleanor's place. To not think of it as a plothole, Real Eleanor had to be an ace up his sleeve that he planned to only use if it came to that.**

* * *

CHAPTER TEN

THE REAL EMMA SWAN

Everyone sat (or stood) awkwardly in Michael's office, Emma and... the other Emma seated opposite him at his desk.

"Well, this is an amazing coincidence," Michael began after looking over the file Trevor had given him, "the _Real_ Emma Swan is a princess born in a nightclub called The Enchanted Forest in The Land of Music. And Fake Emma Swan is a princess born in a part of The Land of Fairy Tales called The Enchanted Forest. And _get this_. You _both_ died at practically the same time, within one ten thousandth of a second in the _same_ accident!"

"The car accident?" asked Emma, confused.

"Piano," sighed the other Emma. "I was visiting my friend who runs The Enchanted Forest and helping her tune the piano for her charity fundraiser for homeless children on my way to catch a portal back to The Land Without Magic to attend a death-penalty conference. Suddenly a tornado ripped open the ceiling. I fell in and the top closed. And the next thing I knew I was plummeting out of the sky above an unfamiliar and town and, well... that's all she wrote!"

"Yes, right," nodded Michael. "Real Emma was attempting to help better lives of countless people when that tornado struck while on the other end of that portal Fake Emma was buying lube and the new issue of _Celebrity Baby Plastic Surgery Disaster_ s."

"It was for my mother," Emma muttered.

"Anyway," Michael cleared his throat. "It's just an embarrassing clerical error. I mean the odds of two princesses born in places with the same name at the same time dying in the same magical tornado summoning sparkly pink piano accident is... well... I'm sure Janet could give actual odds if she wasn't still relearning everything," he concluded with a look in Emma's direction.

"Hey, Bad Janet!" Trevor called and a bleached blonde Janet in leather appeared glued to her smart phone. "What are the odds on that?"

" _What are the odds on what? Your dick falling off_?" Bad Janet mocked and fake dropped a microphone. "Bad Janet out!"

"What's even the point of her?" asked Real Emma.

Trevor shrugged and stated, "Well, now that everything's cleared up here for Real Emma and Fake Emma, we'll be taking Fake Emma-"

"No, we're going to negotiate keeping both Emmas here," Michael cut him off.

"Really?" Emma gasped.

"What!?" cried Trevor. "But why? Why would you want this horrible person forking up your place? Did I just say 'fork'? Really? You still have that forking filter on?"

"The residents don't like cursing. And fake Emma may have a bad record," Michael stated, "but she knows she did bad things. And a lot of them _did_ involve manipulations caused directly or indirectly by our common enemy."

"More of a frenemy," shrugged Trevor. "But it's not like Fake Emma had no free will." He threw her a grin. "Thanks for forking up that election with your time travel by the way. I'm super stoked about adding Trump to the Presidents Wing!"

"How many presidents are there?" asked Real Emma.

"All of them but Lincoln," sighed Michael who then pressed Trevor.

"Zeus is not our 'frenemy'. He threatens to _undo reality_ with all of his meddling! Everything we worked so hard to maintain, he has no rules and regulations! He sends people back to life just to be a... a..."

"Douche?" Trevor suggested and shrugged.

"Yes, a douche. He's even douchier than you!" Michael huffed.

"Okay, fine, Zeus has almost destroyed reality a few times with his stupid pen that he gave to humans for some stupid reason that probably involved a drinking game and one of his orgies," Trevor conceded, "and we could probably trace the TPI to something Isaac here wrote down to inspire that crazy witch to attempt a time travel spell that Dumb-Dumb here ran toward when she had no magic to stop it. But what will you give me for both Emmas?"

"I don't know... how about a unicorn?" Michael offered.

"Already tried one," Trevor shot down. "The meat was tough. Kinda gamy. And the powdered horn did not give me a boner as promised."

Michael rubbed his temples. "Fine, we'll come back tomorrow and work this out. Maybe Janet will be recovered by then."

* * *

Emma wasn't sure the situation could get more awkward until she had to take "Real Emma" to _her_ house. Plus, _Trevor_ had insisted on joining them.

"Huh," the demon remarked, "This place looks exactly the same on the outside as _your_ house in The Bad Place. Wonder if it has an Elvis nook?"

It did, of course, have an Elvis nook and Real Emma looked on it fondly, stating, "These pictures were my safe haven amidst the broken baby toys and extremely unsafe crib with a broken glass unicorn mobile that would randomly start spinning and shooting very sharp pieces of glass."

"Is that it?" Emma shrugged.

"Oh, no. The toaster would come alive and chase me around the house, the toilet seats were always up, the only food in the cupboards was stale, half-eaten Pop-Tarts that turned to spiders in your mouth, the couch smelled like cheap rum and sex and no matter how much Fabreeze I sprayed on it, I couldn't get the stench out, and my bedroom was a prison cell with a cricket that I could never find. At least I had my paintings to remember there was goodness even in such a dark place!"

"Yeah," grumbled Emma, "an Elvis impersonator tried to molest me in a fun house once. I hate them."

"Well that explains the Flying Elvi parachutting in for the baby shower then."

"Baby shower?"

"Yes," Real Emma nodded. "I had to organize and attend an endless baby shower for a woman I didn't know every day. For some reason it was always at one of those pop-up carnivals or a state fair and if I didn't know everyone's names I got trapped in one of those claw machines and the toys would come to life and try to suffocate me.

"Night was far worse, though, with the flying piranhas, lava monsters, college improv, and constant jazz music."

"And the cricket," Neal recalled.

"Oh, no, I made friends with the cricket!"

"Of course you did," Emma grumbled to herself, thinking of that time she didn't listen to Archie about getting her shit together and wishing she could go back in time and punch that Emma in the face.

* * *

Emma poked miserably at her convenience store favorite ever meal food. Michael's office was uncomfortable. Her house was really uncomfortable. Dinner with a good version of her was _way_ worse.

For one thing, her meal was no longer as meaningful as it would have been had she joined Neal for the restaurant opening. He'd ordered something different, anyway, and didn't seem to even notice her stupid attempt to show she remembered. Because now he had his real soulmate.

"... and I can't say I have a great singing voice," laughed Real Emma, "but I do love music. I was able bring some records back to The Land of Music and enchant them to play. I've almost worn out 'Coney Island Baby'."

"You like Lou Reed?" Neal beamed.

"Oh, yes..."

Emma turned them out and got nudged in the side by Trevor, her chaperone, who snarked, "You should smile more, beautiful!"

"Shut up," Emma grouched.

"Not a fan of the obvious true love connection, huh? I guess now you know how it feels to get ignored by the person you love in favor of someone prettier with a British accent in your last moments before you might never see them again. Feels pretty crappy, huh?"

"Yes, it does!" Emma hissed.

"So, Real Emma," Trevor spoke up, "tell us more about yourself. You're just so fascinating!"

"Yeah," Emma challenged, "I mean, you must have had quite a cushy life to have turned out with such a sparkling personality and do such good all the time. Perfect loving parents, nice house, money up the wazzu. I mean, me, my parents abandoned me by the side of a road. Or that's what I thought, anyway, until I was twenty-eight. I grew up in the Foster System. A puppet took all my money and sent me to prison where I had to give up my kid. That sort of thing can mess a person up."

"Actually, I never met my parents," Real Emma answered. "I was also abandoned as a baby-in a fish tank at a train station in Bangladesh. A couple adopted me, the Swans, but they died of bird flu when I was four - I know, ironic! Then the orphanage burned down. But I made it to England where I learned English from _Monty Python_ reruns and fell in love with Nigel. He was a few years older, attending Oxford. I was working as a maid. We were married for six years before he was killed in the London subway bombing. Which was right after I'd found out I was pregnant. We'd already had three miscarriages. We had a daughter, but she had a congenital disease and died after only a few days. I was actually working on a benefit for the charity I founded in her name to raise money for medical research when this old wizard showed up and told me I had a destiny to save The Land of Music and he sent me there and I did save it and a number of other realms and now I'm deader than a stuffed parrot."

"I've ceased to be!" Neal chimed in and they both laughed.

Frowning and growing seriously annoyed, Emma asked, "How are you not messed up from all of that? _And_ being accidentally sent to Hell?"

Real Emma shrugged and answered, "I've always tried to make the best of situations. I didn't really believe in Heaven or Hell, so I wasn't expecting to go any place in particular. It was shocking at first, of course, but I really felt bad for the people torturing me. And for the other souls there. I mean, many of them have had terrible lives. Far worse than mine."

"But you must be suffering the trauma of your experiences! You were being tortured down there!"

"No, no, no, it was fine. I had a rusty cot to sleep on and made up songs with the cricket."

"That's... really inspirational," Neal piped up. "I mean, when I was stuck in Neverland it was really hard to remember that the Lost Boys and the pirates had crap lives, that Hook probably got messed up as a kid to hand me over to that child-abusing demon, and to have hope that I'd find a way out even if there was no one to help me."

"And you did!" gushed Real Emma.

"And you couldn't last five days without losing your shirt," sniggered Trevor at Emma. "Well, not your actual shirt. Although that came rather soon after along with your pants and your dignity for step-daddy of the year. Yo-Ho- _Hoe,_ " he made a crude gesture with his fingers under the table, "am I right?"

"I need to use the ladies room," Emma mumbled and hurried off to the bathroom. She splashed water on her face and grabbed a paper towel, jumping when Trevor was in the mirror.

"You know the rules, Trash Bag."

"I am not letting you watch me pee, you pervert!"

"That's fine. I'm cool with watching you cry," he shrugged.

"I am not crying!" Emma snapped and walked back out to the restaurant where Neal and Real Emma had their heads down together, talking too quietly to eavesdrop on.

She didn't bother going back to the table and headed into the night air instead, aware that Trevor was trailing her, texting on his phone as he did.

This was awful. This was worse than being stuck in The Bad Place. That stupid douchey demon was right. Getting a taste of her own medicine in the form of Neal's oblivious happiness was worse than any punishment anyone else could have devised, even Isaac. She'd been stupid to keep pushing him away out of spite and bitterness while throwing herself at a pretty bad boy. Sure, he was a pretty bad boy whose backstory didn't converge with hers in any meaningful way so there was no annoyingly complicated stuff like guilt and regret other than the magical crap that got thrown at them after she jumped into his bed... which may or may not have been the bed he banged Neal's mom in for years, depending of if Blackbeard changed the mattress, and she really didn't want to know the answer to that.

"Nope," said Bad Janet, having appeared out of nowhere and still glued to her phone. "You totally forked your kid's step grandpa in the same bed he porked your kid's grandma in for seven years. And no, the pirate never used detergent. Or had more than one set of sheets. Looks like a Jackson Pollock painting under blacklight."

Bad Janet held out her phone which somehow had a picture of Hook's bed on his ship with a magical UV light.

"I'm going to be sick!" Emma gagged and ran back into a stall.

"That's a cool filter, Bad Janet!" Trevor complimented.

"Wanna see your bedroom?" the bad guide bot said, changing the picture. "Oh, filter doesn't seem to be working. No wait. It's just cause you can't get laid and your unicorn boner dust didn't work. BAD JANET BURN!"

Bad Janet vanished and Emma emerged.

"You forked up, Ding-Dong," Trevor told her with a grin. "How about a drink?"

"Fine, whatever," Emma sighed, letting him guide her into the nearest bar.

* * *

"I mean age differences be damned to a certain extent, but really, that pirate was past his prime before you were even conceived as that alternate reality should have proven, Fake Swan," said Trevor, earning a glare.

"I'm just as real as the _other_ Emma. Stop calling me 'fake'."

"Oh, please, sweetheart!" Trevor scoffed her. "When have you ever _not_ been fake? You pretended to be whatever you thought parents would want to adopt.

"You pretended to be whatever you needed to be to rob convenience stores.

"You pretended to be a hardened criminal to not get your ash kicked in prison.

"You pretended to not be ready to raise a kid so you wouldn't have to risk screwing up the kid, which is really just the poor non-magical version of your dumbshirt mother's curse-your-zygote method.

"You pretended to be a criminal loser for years so you wouldn't have to face that maybe you could have made something of yourself and been good enough to be a mother but gave up your kid and regretted it.

"You pretended to be Cleo Fox 2.0, a real badass you never were, and even worse you kept up that act so your kid wouldn't be disappointed in you _and_ you tried to convince yourself there was even the slightest bit of good in any of that, like the jacket you so callously bought off that bawling girl was armor or a super hero cape, anything but the mark of a self-involved bench who ruined the happy ending of two people to get a file with nothing in it."

Emma scowled.

Trevor continued.

"And in your delusion to not admit your criminal past turned you into a total shirthead, you pretended to like being a savior so your family would be proud of you and you wouldn't lose your boyfriend who only liked you because you being extra good made him feel extra special, even though you both also hated that the responsibilities made you age hella fast and badly and took away from your sexy time.

"And let's not forget," Trevor continued laying into her, "you pretended to be a big bad Dark One, memory-wiping your family and taking little girls hearts and making up some bullshirt story that they wronged you to scare everyone, when really you were just a scared little girl who wanted to cry in the corner of the ugly house you essentially stole from the previous owners because your boyfriend wanted to buy it for you because it symbolized his happy ending and looked sort of vaguely like an ugly castle or something and you failed to get a happy ending for all the guys you liked, including your kid's dad that you kinda screwed over and acted like you completely forgot about, yet turned your lame-ash cover-up scheme into an arts and crafts project recreating again and again the one thing other than your kid he left behind with memories that weren't tainted by a decade of assumed betrayal."

Trevor smirked while Emma stared at him in shocked dismay at his psychoanalyzing.

"What? I'm a selfish demon, but I've got eyes and a brain, baby. Plus all the famous shrinks are in The Bad Place. Freud. Jung. Even a few not German ones who didn't want to fork their mothers. I've already got a perfect hovel picked out for Dr. Phil."

"I didn't want to fail one more person who was counting on me, okay?" Emma sighed. "Who thought I could help them find happiness. That... that I thought I could find happiness with," she sniffled over her drink. "All I ever wanted to have was a family. A _normal_ family like everyone else. A normal _life_. I thought I was going to have that with Neal. I _really_ did _truly_ love him even if it was only because of a Curse that we met."

Emma shook her head. "I suppose that's the only reason for us to have met. He's a good person. And I _am_ a bad person. He deserves Real Emma. I _am_ a fake. All I ever did in life was run away from my feelings and the right choices and tell people bullshirt stuff like you just have to come back and ask for forgiveness. But you can't if they're dead! And even when you're dead too, it's too late, because you ruined your afterlife by trying too hard to make a perfect happy ending in actual life.

"I could have been happy with Neal," she sighed. "Maybe it wouldn't have been all violent passion and desperation and lies-"

"The _best_ kind of romance," grinned Trevor.

"But I wouldn't have had this terrified voice in the back of my head all the time saying it was all just a big sham," Emma lamented, "that it was going to fall apart so I had to try harder, be more... whatever Killian and my parents and Henry wanted or needed me to be so it would be... as close to Tallahassee as anything could without Neal."

Emma threw back another shot and stated, "I don't deserve to be here. Neal has his soulmate now. I should be punished for all the good people I've let down."

Trevor grinned and patted her on back. "There. Now doesn't it feel better to get that all out? Come on. We've got packing to do, Ding-Dong!"

* * *

Emma awoke in her bathtub with a splitting headache and Neal looming over her with steaming coffee cup.

"What... oh... I thought you couldn't get hangovers here!"

"The Bad Place people wanted the filter turned off. It was that one or the cursing filter."

"Fork."

Emma took a sip, discovering it was hot chocolate (with cinnamon) rather than coffee. "Thanks."

"I figured you'd need it."

Emma looked sadly at the cup. "I haven't had hot chocolate in ages. My mom used to make it for me and Henry, but she just got preoccupied with my brother, I guess. I started getting coffee at Granny's for myself and my dad... and Hook. It was just easier and less... no lingering reminders that the person I thought was my new awesome super close best friend turned out to be my judgmental, intrusive, not very close mother. I think New York with Henry was the last time I made it, when I didn't remember my life sucked in all kinds of creative ways. It's at least the last time I had any without boozing it up. Did I mention that I kinda became an alcoholic?"

"I kinda figured that out," Neal told her. "It'd be hard not to living an especially a high functioning one who put rum in pretty much everything and didn't think anything of anyone else's far lower tolerance when he wasn't only thinking of that to get laid. Plus from all the empty rum bottles you keep throwing in the trash and behind the bushes instead of the recycle bin."

"I'm not a good person, Neal," Emma told him sadly. "I wanted to be. When I pointed to Tallahassee on that map, I wanted to finally try _and succeed_ at being a good, honest person. I really thought I could do it too. I could get my shirt together, the two of us would help each other, and then we'd be good people. Maybe not super good perfect people like Real Emma who fight world hunger and save ogre war orphans, but like at the upper end of medium people, you know?

"We were going to take our bad karma money and make ourselves better. We'd get medium jobs, have a medium wedding and a medium house, send our kids to a medium school to give them a better life than we had, you know? Henry would have grown up never wondering if he was loved. Maybe he'd have had brothers and sisters. And not skipped class so much."

"Yeah, maybe," Neal sighed.

"But that didn't happen," Emma lamented. "That never happens for us. I'm just... I screw up your life. It's no wonder August wanted you to leave. Maybe he wasn't trying to help me. He was just trying to save you from being more Emma Swan collateral damage."

"Hey, you didn't entirely screw it up," Neal pointed out. "We had a son together. And I got to meet him."

"For like a second. He barely remembers you. He's replacing you. If he'd gotten to see you before you died, if I'd encouraged him to learn anything about you, spent time talking about you, took him back to New York myself to get your stuff than maybe he'd remember enough to care, maybe he would," Emma sniffled. "But I didn't do any of that. I was happy to forget. It was easier to forget you and just start over and hope he could forget too and let Hook be whatever he needed that you couldn't be. And I'm _so_ sorry, Neal. I hurt you. And I really hurt Henry and he'll never know how much I wish I could go back and make different choices."

"Or, there is. I _did_ call you, remember?"

Emma startled. "Wait... you're saying The Good Place has a phone? Like The Underworld?"

"Well, I don't know about The Underworld, but yeah. Janet took me to it. But it can only be used in the case of an emergency."

"Like if someone you knew was going to try to raise the dead by taking her entire family to The Underworld which could led to a god escaping to terrorize humanity and innocent souls being tossed into eternal tormentor death?"

"Yeah, like that."

"I suppose me getting sent to The Bad Place doesn't qualify," Emma moped.

"Probably not. But Janet's not really in a condition to enforce the rules, is she?" Neal countered.

* * *

Henry found himself sitting in his old castle next to... "Mom?"

"Hey, Kid," Emma smiled sadly. "Though you're not much a kid anymore, are you?"

"I've grown up a bit since you died," he said, swallowing thickly. "Is this a dream?"

"No, like your dad told me once, we'd be talking donuts or something," Emma responded.

She let out a sigh before continuing, "I'm sorry, Henry. I failed you pretty badly as a mother. And as a savior. I wasn't a very good person. I wanted to be, once. You made me want to try again. But... it was hard and I got scared and I kept taking the easy way out, doing what felt good, which usually wasn't good. I made the choices that didn't hurt as much over choosing the paths that were more difficult, less guaranteed to have a happy ending."

"Did you even want me?" Henry asked, tearing up.

"Oh, Henry, of course I wanted you!" Emma gasped, taking his hands. "You're the best parts of me and more, and all the good parts of your dad and he has a lot more than I do. Those are the parts you should focus on, not all of this fairy tale, Author, sword fighting and damsel saving crap. Being a real hero, a real good person, is _really_ helping people who need it, even knowing you don't get any recognition. That's what you brought me to Storybrooke to do, and I let our family of, well, not very good people, lead me astray into helping them be happy without atoning for the things they'd done, without helping the people they hurt. I forget the wisdom of that little boy on my doorstep who just wanted justice done."

"I also wanted to be loved," Henry told her. "I was hoping you'd love me too."

"And I did. I do, more than you can know," Emma told him tearfully. "I just... I was never good at showing you that and I surrounded myself with people and things that made it easier to not have to. People I could cling to and lose and no matter what I told myself, still be okay. Losing you? That would have destroyed me, Kid. But you, losing me, you'll be okay."

"It doesn't feel like it," Henry lamented. "It feels like nobody understands me anymore. Though, I guess, it felt like you stopped understanding a long time ago. I guess I hoped you'd change back, that things would be like they were before Neverland when I screwed everything up. If I hadn't given Pan my heart, he never would have gotten to Storybrooke and cast the curse again. Grandpa wouldn't have had to sacrifice himself and Dad wouldn't be dead and-"

"I wouldn't have married Hook and got squashed by a piano?" Emma finished for him. "It's not your fault, Henry. I was the one who got the savior destiny. And I was your mom. _And_ I was Sheriff. I should have protected you. Instead I spent days wandering around in the jungle with my head up my butt seesawing between feeling guilty and flirting with Hook. Meanwhile, it took your dad like an hour to find you, which I never even knew. He just got tricked into losing you and was too embarrassed to say anything.

"That's the kind of parent he was, the kind of guy who risked his life for others but never expected any recognition for anything he did," Emma praised. "I should have been helping him find you. And I should have met him for coffee that day and told him I was worried about you. I bet he'd have figured it out and we'd have stopped Pan. And maybe we could have been happy together as a family."

"Now it's too late," Henry moped. "You're both dead."

"Yeah, we are," Emma sighed, "but we really are looking down on you, Henry. Your dad is here, and he loves you. I know it's hard, it's hard to be part of a family made up of legends who think having their story in some book or deciding not to do bad things anymore makes them heroes when you know deep down that's a bunch of crap. Ten year old Henry knew that. I used to know that.

"Don't let growing up and losing and being crapped on by the universe make you forget what real heroism and goodness are," Emma cautioned. "Don't be like me, giving everyone a free pass so I could get one too. And acting like everyone has to have hope only at the worst of times and that it'll make everything okay but if it they don't have hope then they don't deserve help. Hope shouldn't only exist in the darkness. And you shouldn't give up on someone just because they can't find it for themselves."

There was a distant roaring sound then like the ocean or an approaching train and Emma sighed.

"I've gotta go, Kid. I love you."

She placed a kiss on his forehead and jumped down to the sand.

Back to the beach near the Self-Destruct Button where an old-timey phone stuck out of the side of a cliff. Henry was gone along with his castle, his old safe place that she'd never even bothered to rebuild before he was too old for it.

"How'd it go?" Neal asked.

Emma tried to answer, but ended up shrugging before the effort to hold back tears became too great. Neal stepped forward and pulled her into a hug as she started to cry. Henry really did hug just like his dad. And she'd never gets hugs from either of them ever again.

* * *

AN: So that's a wrap until _The Good Place_ returns in January! (I don't own the parts of Real Emma's backstory that belong to Real Eleanor.)

Credit to alice / dahliaface on Twitter for "I mean age differences be damned to a certain extent, but really, he is past his prime before you were even conceived."


	11. VORS

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fork.**

 **General Editing Note: A few minor changes and fixes were made to previous chapters as I reread the story, like accidentally reverting to the clown paintings from the show instead of the velvet Elvises and putting in a line or two about Gideon. It's nothing major that affects the plot.**

* * *

CHAPTER ELEVEN

VORS

"I mean, I think we're all in agreement here," said Trevor as they were all again gathered in Michael's office. "It's time for this flower-festooned dick cozy to head home."

"Hehe, dick cozy," Bad Janet giggled. "Fake Emma is a dick cozy! Fake Emma is a dick cozy!"

"I don't think that language is really necessary!" Real Emma argued.

"Thanks, Real Emma," sighed Emma.

Trevor snorted. "Please, you've seen her file, Michael. Never has there been a worse devolution of a female character, from bad-ass to ass-being-tapped-by-badly-written-fork-boy. I mean, even Zeus couldn't take away all their free will."

"Oh!" Bad Janet interjected, smacking her gum, "remember when the Dick Cozy forgave the Pirate Dildo for not throwing away Zeus's Scissors of Fate because she was a huge coward and a shirtty mom who didn't even attempt to find out that because her rum-powered vibrator didn't toss them out her kid almost got murdered by his half-brother in revenge for him murdering their father? True love is so awesome!"

Emma glared at the divinely designed robot while "Real Emma" gave her a concerned look and inquired, "You married a man who killed his own father and nearly got your own child killed?"

"Yes, okay?" Emma groaned. "I made a lot of bad relationship choices! I've been kind of a bench, I get it!"

"More of a doormat if you're looking for a home decor-related metaphor," argued Trevor who then turned back to Michael.

"Clearly it was some meddling on Zeus' part that she even was made a savior! Or maybe she's a pawn in that ongoing sorority feud with Blue and Black over the whole mating with a mortal douchebag."

"I thought The Black Fairy's heart grew dark for unknown reasons-"

"Rheul Ghorm lies more than a dead dog, Pirate Condom," Trevor said, amending, "And you really should have used those. I mean, even in The Bad Place we practice safe sex. Here, sure, you get a clean bill of health. Down there? Everything you ever had that antibiotics cleared up, sweetipie, it's _all_ coming back at the same time! Oh, come on, smile!"

Emma sunk into her chair. She wanted to cry. Or throw up. Maybe both. Instead she squared her shoulders, sat up straight again, and said, "I'm not going to The Bad Place."

"W-what?" sputtered Trevor. "But... you agreed!"

"Yeah, after you got me wasted and made me feel like even worse shit than I already was!" Emma huffed. "And apparently I fell for that douchebag tactic every time when I was alive! Well, not anymore, _Trevor_!

"I know I don't belong here," Emma addressed everyone. "I know I'm not good enough. Maybe I did die a flower-festooned dick cozy. But I've changed by being here. And I've changed my mind. I want to be good enough! I don't want to be a dick cozy. I don't want to be 'Fake Emma'. I want to be the best version of me possible. So I'm not leaving until I am, and only then, if I'm still not good enough to earn a place here... then I'll go and spend eternity in The Bad Place with flying piranhas and rapey Elvises and herpes!"

"Tell that to Sean when he gets here, Trainspotting Reject," Trevor argued, then amended, "Seriously, turning in an ashole and getting with that pirate made you look like a heroine junkie. I'd say 'true love' blinded you both, but I've got this theory that the pirate has this 'Dorian Gray' type magic that sucks the beauty of out people to retain his smolder turned up to eleven. Which, just for that, he should go to my place. Not the magic, but the smolder. No one should have theirs turned up to eleven _all_ the time!"

* * *

Trevor and his goons had left so Michael and his "legal team" could get to business. That team consisted of Real Emma, some human rights lawyer guy, Neal, and Emma herself.

Emma knew she should be paying attention as Michael pulled out books that included "the actual Greeks, not Zeus' dumb fraternity" but she was too preoccupied trying not to feel jealous that Neal was standing behind "Real Emma". She knew they were soulmates, but damn it, she actually _knew_ Neal. They'd been in love once, made plans to spend the rest of their lives together in Tallahassee, that dot on a map.

Which was ironic because, apparently, these afterlife designer beings never looked at anyone's file until _after_ they were chosen to be in The Good Place. They were all just sealed files and dots on a map. Maybe _Sean_ being a judge, Emma wondered, knew what was in the files, but the Architects had no idea what anyone even looked like.

 _"We don't want to know what people look like,"_ Michael had explained. _"What difference does it make? Like forming a symphony, each neighborhood is about creating a harmony. It's utterly unimportant what people look like or where they're from. We have a mathematical system to remove any possibility that any person would get in for any reason other than their pure deeds and actions. We do it blind. We're just going to take the people who have the best scores. We know what their names are, but we don't know anything about them other than what they've done and what they've accomplished on their time on Earth. Anything else... it's in the files, of course, but we never look at those before a neighborhood is designed and the occupants chosen. For the most part, it's an issue that never even comes up."_

Only now it had come up in a _big_ way and Emma was at the center of it. It always seemed like she was at the center of things, and maybe _that_ had given a bit of a chip on her shoulder or an overly inflated sense of self-importance, depending on the circumstance. But she'd never wanted that, to stand out as the weird/bad or special one, because she was always the former as a kid and that definitely didn't bring her happiness. Turned out being special wasn't any better. It was the same deluding herself that if she just took away that specialness she already had everything she needed to be happy. So maybe that meant she and Neal never would have been happy if they stopped being criminals and just had a normal life. Maybe they were never destined for anything. Maybe _she_ was never destined for anything and the way her life played out was all just some last minute script rewrite by the gods that made her a shitty understudy for someone better, more deserving, like _Real Emma_.

"...or we could go with Keith Woolner," Michael concluded, adding another book to the pile.

"I'm not familiar with that philosopher," said Real Emma.

"He's not a philosopher," Neal answered. "He wrote about-"

"Baseball!" Emma exclaimed, feeling vindicated that _she_ knew something that Neal knew that _Real Emma_ didn't, but then felt bad that she felt superior. Of course, her name twin didn't even seem to care about her momentary smug look!

"Yes, that's right," Michael nodded. "He popularized the statistical analysis of the value over replacement players, or VORP, that demonstrates how much a hitter contributes offensively or how much a pitcher contributes to his team in comparison to a fictitious replacement player who is an average fielder at his position and a below average hitter, basically the level of performance an average team can expect when trying to replace a player at minimal cost."

"So, what," Emma asked, "you want to calculate my... value over a replacement _soul_?"

"Actually, that could work!" Real Emma nodded.

"Yes," agreed the lawyer guy. "I could work with that."

"If that isn't enough," Michael continued, "we can always resort to the Temporal Paradox Defense."

0"The Temporal Paradox Defense?" Real Emma questioned.

"Yes, yes. Since Fake Emma was the cause of the Temporal Paradox Incident that caused the universe to be rewritten, she essentially caused herself to be rewritten since she went back to a time before she was even conceived."

"I did?" Emma asked.

"Yes, obviously. You caused a lot of things to be rewritten. You caused the _creation_ of The Land of Untold Stories. Things that couldn't easily be rewritten instantly to fit the new timeline were funneled off into that new land and put on pause until you returned to your present and that could all be fit back in. Which, of course, you did badly. Plus, a bunch of new magical MacGuffins were created to try and explain things that couldn't be easily reconciled even by Zeus and his cronies. But the most unfortunate rewriting wasn't even what you did to your parents' meeting - not that anything could be worse than the sapling finger-banging - but that you, yourself, are almost certainly different."

After a pause, Michael continued, "While you had made a lot of mistakes in your past, as I said, you passed the litmus test. And as a savior, when you got to Storybrooke, you weren't horrible at it. Your morals were generally in the right place, helping the victims against their attackers and oppressors, which suggests that there _is_ good in you. Maybe your parents never cast that spell on you and Lily originally and you had your own darkness rather than absorbing the darkness of others over time. But my point is that aside from a few bad choices you showed real promise until Neverland, which isn't surprising. Pan was quite a manipulative little shirt who knew exactly how to twist orphans. He did turn those boys of his into sadists who liked to torture little kids. So there could be some argument that he dredged up past traumas you hadn't fully dealt with that impacted your decision making from there on out, including the things you did in the past.

"You see, Good Emma essentially ceased to exist the moment she fell down a time portal. Just the opening of that portal altered the wind, the path of insects, resetting the universe into something new that... cemented itself after you and the pirate returned to the future. Well, not _you_ you. That you was a sort of intermediary you between the pre-portal Emma and the back-to-the-future Emma, which is you. Back in the future, you suddenly became the Emma who resulted from all the different events that happened due to the past being changed even though you retained the memories of changing them but not the original memories before they were changed, which is part of the dangerous paradox.

"So," Real Emma caught on, "it's entirely possible that Fake Emma wasn't originally a horrible person, but the butterfly effect of all the different choices people made, actions they took, events that happened because she and that pirate went to the past and altered how her parents met, she turned out differently."

"Yes, exactly," nodded Michael. "Mostly, of course, that would be events directly related to The Enchanted Forest and magic occurring after Fake Emma arrived in Storybrooke, but since there _were_ actors from that world in The Land Without Magic meddling in her life behind the scenes... I mean, for all we know, The Sorcerer's Apprentice didn't initially bring Ingrid to Earth. Or he didn't tell Lily to stalk Fake Emma and kidnap her son-"

"Hold up!" Emma interjected. "Lily kidnapped Henry!?"

"Well, how to do imagine a three week old infant in the foster system got from Phoenix to Boston?" Michael questioned. "Apparently, he was stolen from the hospital by someone impersonating a case worker and was later dropped off anonymously at a group home in Boston. The culprit was never found. I'm sure if Janet had fully rebooted, she could tell us who the culprit was. But since her original memory was wiped, she couldn't tell us if the same person was the kidnapper in the original universe. Or if Fake Emma was originally _not_ cursed by her parents before she was born to have no darkness of her own. Those would be sealed files that only Sean would be able to provide.

"In any event," Michael continued, "we could at least argue that Fake Emma's horribly disgusting relationship with that emotionally abusive rapist murderer pirate was a direct result of the time travel. She met his past self when he was drunk. His past self developed a subconscious or dream obsession with the mysterious woman who tried to seduce him."

"But he said he didn't remember," Emma pointed out, which earned a sour look from everyone and she sighed. "All right, fine, our relationship that we insisted was based on honesty was really based entirely on an endless series of secrets, lies, half-truths, denials, and manipulations. Happy?"

"Kinda," smirked Neal.

"You really think I made Killian fall in love with me?" groaned Emma.

"He does fit the profile of a psychopath who would become obsessed over something like that," Real Emma stated. "The one woman that both got the better of him and got away? He'd want to kill you, make you suffer, but then he also clearly suffers from brain damage due to neurosyphilis which would increase his sex drive making even revenge ultimately secondary to satisfying his sexual desires. Combine the two, and the best revenge was his living well with you as his prize, divested of everything that was once good and special about you. It's possible that you weren't a _bad_ person, just a regular person, who had their goodness tainted by an obsession you inadvertently created through time travel."

"Exactly," nodded Michael. "So, we need to prove that there _was_ something special about you, Fake Emma. Not the savior nonsense or royal birthright. But that you offer something to the team, more than just the average soul. And if we can prove that all of the horribly selfish things you did as a savior or even before then were really the unfortunate result of falling down that time portal and bumbling around in the past... which itself certainly wasn't your shining moment, but it was less benchy than erasing memories and taking a little girl's heart and swooning over a guy who attempted suicide to get your attention."

"The abusive relationship could definitely work in our favor," the lawyer guy nodded. "It's not quite Battered Wife Syndrome, but given that Pan had already opened up old traumas when this pirate swooped in and started demanding sexual favors, it does seem that he used her arrested emotional development and insecurities stemming from her life of abandonment to manipulate her into becoming dependent on him and believing that dependence was love and that his control was also love. It's really very common, especially in countries where I worked that treated women like property. But you don't need to be forced into a burka or be part of some cult to be brainwashed into thinking an abuser is just a 'bad boy' looking to be reformed by love. And if it turns out that that spell predisposed her to absorbing the dark inclinations of others because she had none of her own and was out of balance, well, certainly all the better!"

"This just might work!" Michael beamed and stood up. "Well, let's get started. And try not to dwell on the fact that you are the only thing standing between Fake Emma and an eternity of torment!"

"That's not helpful, man!" Neal huffed and Michael winced.

"Yes, I regretted it as soon as I said it," he admitted. "Now go on. I have to get everything in order for Sean's arrival. If things aren't just so... well... you focus on the trial."

* * *

Joanne stood in shock in the hidden room she'd walked into... and found her "soulmate" eating Cheetos and watching a memory video of himself surrounded by feudal style buildings launching magic at clearly Shangri-La-nese soldiers. Because this was The Good Place, even though they were all clearly speaking Chinese, Joanne could understand his memory self taunting the soldiers.

"... eat my farts, idiots!" the past 'monk' declared before _transforming into a dragon_ and roasting them all alive!

"WHO ARE YOU!?"

Jianyu fell out of his chair as he spun around and gulped. "I... um..."

"You said you were from _Earth_. You never said you could turn into a dragon! Or that you'd killed people! And I'm pretty sure monks don't say 'eat my farts'!" Joanne howled.

The Dragon winced. "Fine, you got me. If it matters, 'Jianyu' is the name I was born with. And I did both visit and live in the Land Without Magic. And I impersonated a monk to get out of serving in the army under a corrupt emperor."

"I don't remember the emperor at the time of the Dark Curse being corrupt," Joanne replied. "He visited King Leopold-"

"Yes, well," Jianyu sighed and transformed into his actual age at death, startling Joanne. "Everyone appears how they want to appear. Which is usually when they were happiest. Which is usually when they were young. With a few exceptions, of course. You were happiest in Storybrooke when you weren't anyone's servant and treated like an equal. And Fake Emma... well... she kind of just looks like crap because she feels like crap for ending up here by mistake and screwing things up for Baelfire and everyone."

"And _you_ don't feel bad about being here 'by mistake'?" Joanne hissed and he shrugged.

"Not especially. I may have sold some shady potions. And, yes, I killed people, but they were bad people. And I may have abandoned my child, though I didn't really have a choice or I'd have ended up put to death.

"As to why I ended up here?" he shrugged again. "I died before Fake Emma, I think, after escaping from that mirror realm and I expected The Underworld awaited me. But then you died before Baelfire, so time is as meaningless juxtaposed with Earth as is that dark fairy realm. In any case, I remembered some of those long-ago monks' teachings, a belief that there was an Afterlife different from that ordained by the gods, that their afterlife was a false one just as they were false gods, and if you turned your back on Death when that time came, you could go to the true Afterlife. So, perhaps that what I did?" he concluded.

"Why lie about it?" Joanne demanded. "If you weren't a bad person, why not just come clean?"

"Because something is clearly wrong here," said Jianyu. "Maybe Fake Emma was brought here because she was at the center of that Temporal Paradox Incident and it's really just an unfortunate accident that the design of this place couldn't account for. But maybe it's more sinister."

Joanne harumphed and crossed her arms. "I should report you to Michael!"

"But you won't," he argued, "because you care about Fake Emma, even if you pretend that you hate her now. She's the closest you have to family. You don't want her to leave. And if someone is out to get her and cause problems for all of us..."

"All right, fine," Joanne conceded. "But you're cooking your own dinner tonight! Enjoy your Cheetos! And... eat my farts!"

The Dragon watched his not-really-soulmate stomp out of the room and snorted. She really was a fiery one who'd deserved a much better life than being mistreated for most of it by spoiled royals. But then, most people in their world deserved better than what Zeus' flunkies wrote for them. No matter how hard many actually tried to escape their "destinies" obstacles just kept getting thrown in their way until they either gave up or resorted to magic, willing to pay some ultimately horrible price... that Zeus no doubt found highly amusing.

No doubt he found _this_ highly amusing.

* * *

AN: Sorry this was a short and wordy one. Hopefully Sean shows up next week so I can write him in for more excitement! If you watched TGP on Thursday, you probably have surmised there will be some obvious departures in this story. The Dragon isn't going to be marrying Janet, though how hilarious was Jason and Janet's wedding? And Emma really does love Neal in a romantic way, not a misguided hot-for-teacher way like Eleanor and Chidi, and she would never think she had the hots for "Jianyu". Not sure where I should go with Joanne/Johanna and The Dragon. Ship them or anti-ship them? And I'm not entirely sure what The Dragon's past should be, but he has to have known Mulan at some point, right? By the racist basics of the show, all Asian characters should know each other, I assume, but because they are PoC, they are not important enough to have stories with each other told, they're just props for the white characters and Regina, whom A&E probably now wish was played by a white actress since the majority of the fanbase are racists and, apparently, Mormons. The VORS thing came from a question/explanation given by creator Michael Schur in an EW interview ( article/2016/11/04/good-place-creator-fall-finale-kristen-bell?xid=entertainment-weekly_socialflow_twitter).


	12. Eternal Mediocrity

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fork.**

 **General Note: I'm pretty sure I made the point values too high for some minor offenses and put Henry too far in the red. I may go back and fix that. For now just consider it a OUAT-like utter failure to regard established numerical canon .**

 **Chapter Note: Spoilers for the season finale of** _ **The Good Place.**_

* * *

CHAPTER TWELVE

ETERNAL MEDIOCRITY

+1222821

That was the average point total of people in The Good Place.

-24008

That was the score Emma arrived with. Which, considering all of the horrible things she'd done, was a lot better than she'd expected.

The original plan was for Emma to try and earn points in The Good Place, to improve her VORS and thus prove that she had enough value to stay here. Of course, that didn't work. Her motives tainted the result. There was no way she'd get anywhere near Real Emma's +2513654, Joanne's +1948668, or even Neal's +997485 by holding open doors or picking up trash.

Which led Emma to the conclusion that the only thing she could do to earn points was to give everyone apology notes with the intention of leaving. She wouldn't get to stay, of course, but at least she could go feeling good about herself, that she'd done the right thing, the sort of thing that would have gotten her in The Good Place if she'd done it in life. Something like not dragging her family to The Underworld.

At least, that was her plan before Janet, finally rebooted to a non-cactus-petting state, informed her that there actually _was_ a Medium Place that was neither Good nor Bad made for just one person, some woman named Mindy. So, instead of heading to The Bad Place, they hijacked Sean's train and sort of kidnapped The Dragon to head out into the middle of nowhere to find a butt-naked woman picking Middle Mists from her garden.

"I had a dream about Joanne like this," Jianyu commented and Emma punched him in the nuts while the woman screamed and Janet waved.

"Hello! I'm Janet!"

* * *

 _"Welcome to eternal mediocrity. Welcome to The Medium Place."_

Mindy's welcome video featuring Trevor and some woman concluded on her small analogue TV that had a stack of _Cannonball Run_ movies on top of it. She was a strange woman in her thirties who wore a turquoise power suit with overly large gold jewelry.

"And that was twenty-eight years ago today," sighed Mindy. "I really need a drink."

"That's some sound Medium People talk," Emma agreed.

"Janet," The Dragon asked, "how about we go pick some flowers."

"I told you. My powers do not work here. I cannot assume the likeness of Joanne."

"Seriously!?" Emma scoffed at him. "What is _wrong_ with you!?"

The Dragon shrugged. "But you can still make-out, right?"

"Yes."

"Great! We're going to go figure out robot sex!"

"Gross!" Emma growled, especially considering she just couldn't stop seeing the young man as the _old guy_ she knew in life. The last thing she wanted to think about was old people sex. Well, old guy and _young robot_ sex.

"Anything goes in the Afterlife International Waters!" he argued and hurried off with Janet.

"So... how did you end up here all alone?" asked Emma after the pervert and sex robot had left.

* * *

Sean was not happy. Sean was also very weird. He dressed like a judge and retreated into a cocoon whenever anyone got emotional in their testimony, particularly frustrating for Joanne who was not as good at being 'chill' like Baelfire or logical like Real Emma.

"Well this is just useless!" Joanne complained. "Humans are emotional beings! Fake Emma is practically family. I want her to stay!"

"Maybe," suggested Michael, "you should go have some frozen yogurt."

Neal sighed. This wasn't good. It was bad enough when he thought Emma had stolen he train to go to The Bad Place, but apparently she hadn't. She'd gone to some other in-between place and that had made this Sean guy whatever his equivalent of angry was. Neal understood what Emma was thinking, not good enough for The Good Place but not wanting to endure eternal torture. He didn't want her to be tortured for eternity either, but it would have been nice to at least having gotten to tell her how he felt.

* * *

Swirling her highball glass, Mindy explained that she was a corporate attorney in the 1980's and spent her time screwing over good people and snorting a lot of cocaine and having sex parties. Like _Wolf of Wall Street_ kind of stuff. But then one night coked out of her mind she decided she had to do something good with her life, came up with a plan for a charity, and the next morning took out all the money in her bank account to do it... before dying horrifically in a subway accident.

"... so my sister found my plan," Mindy explained, "before I got sent to The Bad Place. Guess I was in a holding pattern for judgment or to be placed in the right Bad neighborhood."

"And then they had to see if yogurt enough good person points for the good you intended to do before you died," Emma deduced.

"Yep. They couldn't decide. So I ended up here."

"Better than being tortured by a fire monster."

"Exactly!" Mindy nodded. "Which is why you can't turn yourself in. It's all about survival. You have to look out for number one!"

* * *

"I've decided," Sean announced and snapped his fingers, summoning Bad Janet.

"Whaddup, forknuts!" the bad helper being exclaimed.

"I need to contact Good Janet," Sean told and used her mouth like Cora used hearts.

* * *

Janet and The Dragon returned and Emma asked, "How'd the robot sex go, pervert?"

"Mostly a lot of bumping into each other. Clearly Janet was never programmed for sex."

"It was weird," nodded Janet.

"Well, I guess we could all sit down and watch some..." Emma picked up another stack of videos. " _Dead of Summer_? Never heard of it. Must be pretty mediocre."

Suddenly Janet went still and began talking in a man's voice.

"Attention, idiots! This is Sean, supreme judge of all existence! Get your butts back here or your friends Neal and Joanne will be going to The Bad Place _in your place!_ You have twenty-four hours!"

* * *

"I don't want to go to Hell," The Dragon complained, pacing the porch. "I may not have been a good person, but I'm no Hitler or Queen of Hearts. I'm a medium person. I can stay here with Janet. It won't be same as gardening with Joanne, but it's better than being tortured for eternity."

"Do you actually _like_ Joanne?" Emma asked, "or do you just have a creepy pervert obsession with her like my husband had with me? I'm a really bad judge of that."

The Dragon shrugged. "Does it matter? I'll never see her again."

Emma sighed and rubbed her temples. "Look, I get it. But I've been using a long list of foster parents' crappy parenting to excuse my behavior my whole life," she lamented. "But no more. It's time to go back and face the music. And if you can't do it for Joanne, do it for the daughter you skipped out on."

"Fine," Jianyu agreed. "But I'm taking the _Cannonball Run_ tapes."

They walked back into the living room where Janet was sitting on the couch while Mindy was taking off her clothes.

"What? It's my masturbation time," said Mindy. "I thought I'd teach her some moves."

While The Dragon looked interested in that, Emma grabbed his arm and ordered the robot, "We're leaving, Janet."

"Okay!"

* * *

"We're here to go to The Bad Place!" Emma exclaimed as she burst into her own sort of house.

"It's too late," Sean retorted. "It's already decided."

"But-"

"I made my decision," he repeated as Jianyu and Janet entered the room. "The deadline was missed. I just want to go back to my pod and go to sleep. The Bad Place requires two people. At this point, I don't care which two of you go. You've all done awful things since you got here. You have thirty minutes to decide," he told them setting a clock on the holo TV.

"Bring me the list of frozen yogurt flavors. There's work to do there as well."

Looking pained, Michael told the group, "All I wanted when I designed a neighborhood was for all of you to be happy. Somehow I blew it and you're all suffering for it. This is truly the saddest day of my life."

He then followed the Eternal Judge out of the room, leaving the mortal souls to decide their ultimate fate.

* * *

AN: If you watched the finale of _The Good Place_ you probably have an idea where this is headed.

Next up: Unhappily ever after.


	13. The Not So Good Place

**Note: GUEST reviewers, please have the courtesy to at least make up a name, will you? Just using "Guest" is lazy as fork.**

 **Chapter Note: Spoilers for the season finale of** _ **The Good Place.**_

* * *

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE NOT SO GOOD PLACE

It wasn't long before discussion turned to arguing.

"Since we've been here I've just tried to stay out of everyone's business," The Dragon reminded. "You wrecked havoc. _Neal_ killed Janet-"

"Stopping you from killing her!" Neal growled.

"Look, Sean is right," Joanne interjected. "We've all done some bad things since getting here. Emma and Jianyu lied about who they were. We covered for them."

"We lied," Emma conceded, "but we also improved ourselves. Well, I did. He mostly smoked pot in his dragon cave," she gestured to Jianyu who rolled his eyes. "We're the ones who screwed up our lives, though. We can't let anyone else go our places."

"I suppose," the young but actually old man sighed and told Joanne. "I'm sorry about the Cheetoes stains on the furniture. You talk _way_ too much. But I did enjoy gardening with you."

Joanne smiled thinly. "You're kind of a slob, but... I did enjoy that too."

Walking a short distance away, Emma shifted uncomfortably and told Neal, "Well, it's been real."

"That's what you're going with?" he smiled ruefully.

"What do you want me to say, Neal? I keep... losing you."

"And I keep failing you," Neal sighed sadly.

Emma fought tears. "You didn't fail me, Neal. I don't know what I'd have done here if it wasn't for you. I was dropped into a cave and you were my... weird coconut thing with light holes in it."

Neal swallowed thickly, wondering if he should dare attempt a kiss. He had just started to lean in when suddenly the front door flew open and Real Emma burst in.

"I'm going to The Bad Place!" she announced.

"WHAT!?" everyone sputtered.

"I've been there. I know I can hack it. I'm kind of friends with the fire monster."

"But... you don't deserve to be there," Emma told her. "You're a good person. You belong in The Good Place."

"Maybe," sighed Real Emma, "but how good is it really? For me? You're supposed to be with your soulmate and mine doesn't love me."

She turned to Neal. "I don't know if it's Emma or someone else, but it's not me. So I'm going. You only have to pick one other person," she told them with a slightly sad smile and then left them back where they'd started.

"Clearly it's Emma then," said Jianyu. "She did fork up history. I just cheated people out of traveler's checks."

"No, I'll go," Neal suddenly decided.

Emma's eyes widened. "Neal, you can't-"

"Real Eleanor is my soulmate," he sighed. "If we're supposed to spend eternity with our soulmates..."

"Do you love her?" Joanne asked.

"I..." Neal hesitated. No, he didn't. But even so. "She's a good person and if she's going down there because of me I'll never be happy."

"Don't be an idiot!" Joanne snapped. "Then you'll just be miserable together! Whether you and Real Emma are soulmates or not, you deserve some happiness after the life you had. You already suffered centuries in Neverland. That's enough. I'll replace Real Emma."

"So you're just going to be all self-sacrificing now?" Jianyu scoffed. "You're always doing that! Trying to one-up everyone else with your goodness. Are you just full of yourself or not as good as you want everyone to think you are? What are you trying to prove, woman?"

As the three continued to argue, Emma suddenly had an epiphany. "Mother forking shirt balls!" she exclaimed as all the pieces suddenly fell into place. All of the little things that didn't add up. Why Joanne was considered so good if she was always bragging about her good deeds. Why Neal's house and the momentoes they'd had together kept getting destroyed. Why Michael kept bringing up the bad things she did in life while not knowing it was her. Had she even actually contacted Henry? Were the :"video feeds" they had watched of family being glad she was dead even real or was _that_ all part of this too?

"What?" Neal asked, bewildered as Emma called the Architect and Judge back into the living room.

"You're sending me and Neal to The Bad Place," Emma ordered the two beings.

"What? But what about Real Eleanor. Neal didn't do anything," Michael argued. "You and _Jianyu_ aren't supposed to be here. Why would you want-"

"You said to pick any of us," Emma shot back. "So it's me and Neal. Let's go. Call a train to take us to The Bad Place. Or is it that you can't? _Because we're already here_? THIS is The Bad Place!"

" _What_?" the others squawked out.

Michael looked ready to argue the point, but Sean rolled his eyes and shrugged. "Oh, enough with this already. It was a good try. Pay up, Michael. I said you wouldn't even make it six months!"

Glaring at the group, Michael growled. "You ruined everything!"

"Hold on," Joanne spoke up, "how can _this_ be The Bad Place? It's... it's so perfect."

"Since _when_?" Emma addressed them all. "It's not perfect. It's more like that place in Dante's _Inferno_ for nonbelievers that's an inferior Heaven."

"I actually got the idea from that," Michael beamed.

"Yeah, maybe you shouldn't have left the book in your office when you had me as your minion."

"Emma's right," Neal agreed as he began thinking back on all of it. He'd been agitated ever since arriving, but he'd chalked it up to his complicated feelings for Emma. "This place _has_ been a smokin hot turd since we got here."

"Exactly! It's a filthy dumpster full of our worst anxieties!" nodded Emma. "Neal gets here and has to watch me fork up my promise to him in life. Joanne gets a soulmate that doesn't talk and has to pretend she actually likes someone listening but not talking to her which is probably just as bad as being a servant and the people she's loyal too not treating her like a person. Jianyu was tortured by the belief that the universe was going to implode _and_ feeling bad about lying to Joanne who helped abandoned kids when he abandoned his. I was tortured by the belief that it was my fault everything was a mess because I screwed up history _and_ the Afterlife! So instead of that crazy story Real Emma told us about The Bad Place, we just tortured each other!"

"I did say that there was something fishy about this place," The Dragon reminded.

"Oh, yeah, you did," Emma recalled. "Guess you should have looked into that instead of smoking pot in your dragon cave all day."

Suddenly Real Emma burst into the room. "Neal, I can't go to the Bad Place! I love you with all my-"

"Oh, can it, Vicky," Michael cut her off. "They've figured it out."

"Damn it! I just practiced that speech for three fucking hours!" Not Emma exclaimed then sighed in relief. "Well, at least I can say 'fuck' again! That was getting really fucking annoying!"

"It was rather ingenious," Sean sighed after Vicky left. "But I did say it wouldn't last. I mean, creating an entire neighborhood for just four people."

" _Everyone_ was in on it?" Neal sputtered.

"It was fun at first," said Michael, "but it got more difficult when the script had to be changed. All that improv is stressful. There's a reason college improv is considered a type of torture."

"When I confessed," Emma realized. "You didn't see it coming because _I_ didn't."

"It complicated things," agreed Michael. "Clearly, there was a reason the gods had all those books setting up rules and destinies before souls even got here."

"They're not dropouts are they?" asked Emma.

"No. They're just another design team," shrugged Michael, "They came up with The Underworld, Tartarus, and Elysium. They were all pretty ticked off when you and your alive family showed up in The Underworld. So it was fairly easy to convince them to let me build a new design to torture you when you died. We had to pull a few souls from other Bad Place neighborhoods and wipe their memories of their being tortured old school there, but we thought it was worth it. Or I did, anyway."

"Well, Sean's right, it failed!" Emma huffed.

After a moment, she wondered, "I do have a question, though. I get why I'm here. And why The Dragon is here. I turned into a total skank and he abandoned his kid and sold fake potions to gullible tourists. But what about Joanne and Neal? They both helped a lot of people."

"Neal also robbed people and abandoned you because a puppet told him to and then chickened out of a second chance that puppet gave him. Plus the _necromancy_ ," Sean stated. "I will say he came the closest of any of you to The Good Place."

"Really?" Neal asked. "Even _Joanne_?"

"The closest doesn't mean remotely close. I mean, we have Hitler."

"That makes me feel worse somehow," muttered Neal.

" _Thank you_. I needed that," Michael sighed, earning a glare from Neal.

"How is Neal a better person than Joanne?" Emma prompted and glanced at Neal. "No offense."

The former maid servant shifted uncomfortably and admitted, "I might have... um... helped Cora poison your grandmother."

"You _what_!?"

Joanne rolled her eyes. "Oh, come on! Eva was an elitist fraud who never did anything good unless it benefited her. It was all to either make her parents proud or to spite someone else. I saw how she was raising her daughter to be the same kind of self-centered brat. She didn't want Snow to treat me nicely because it was _right_ and because I was _equal_ to her, it was so all the peasants would adore her. I read her diary. She didn't change. She just learned that appearing kind got her more praise than instilling fear. She was as much of a monster as Cora or her daughters. Just the wolf in sheep's clothing type. If she'd lived, she would have starved us all with her kindness while bathing in her jewels. We'd have died still thinking she was our beloved queen, and that's a far worse villain than the ones that show their true nature, the ones you don't even know you need to fight."

"Yes, well," said Michael, "that may be, but murder is still murder and watching you be tortured over killing Emma's grandmother because you thought Emma was a perfect do-gooding savior was hilarious. Also, you stole a ton of jewels from her."

"I used them to help war orphans!"

"I didn't say you never did anything good, but not enough to offset the murder. Or putting spiders in a little girl's bed."

" _That's_ why my mother is deathly afraid of spiders?"

"I sort of regretted that one."

"Right, well," Emma told Michael, "your plan didn't work! You brought us here to destroy each other. An amoral slut of a savior, a thieving necromancer coward, a deadbeat dad con artist, and a homicidal maid. But instead you made us a team! Guess you never watched _The Breakfast Club!_ "

"Oh! That's it!" beamed Michael. "That was the flaw. You never should have been so close from the start. The best torture is the slow burn kind! We'll just erase your memories, reboot Good Janet, and start over," he giggled before rushing out of the room.

"Oh," groaned Emma, " _fuck_."

* * *

So, it turned out, Emma was not the only bad person stuck in Heaven. She wasn't even one of two bad people stuck in Heaven. She was in Hell. And they were all about to lose their memories!

But she had one last hope. Hope that even if this was Hell and it was all a long con, that she and Neal did share a connection. Maybe they weren't soulmates. Maybe soulmates were bullshirt... er shit, but maybe they weren't.

Emma scribbled a note on the title page of _On the Road_ , ripped it out, but instead of throwing pages in a fireplace like she'd done with her pages from Henry's book, she folded it up and shoved it in Janet's mouth.

"What-" Neal began to ask but then the door opened, the two demons returning and their time had run out.

"I will always find you!" Emma told him just before everything turned to white.

 **The End  
**

* * *

AN: Turns out my title is rather prophetic, eh? It's actually an idea I was toying with myself and you might have guessed was paralleled with Michael's trash-talking about the gods, but I wasn't sure if I would go that route. It depended where the show went and if I thought it made sense to follow that path or diverge down my own. I guess great minds think alike! And OUAT is rampant with memory charms! Anyway, no promises that this story will continue. I have my fingers crossed that OUAT will end this season and I can wean myself out of this toxic fandom for good. Either way, it's probably best to just leave it here and assume Emma and Neal do find each other in the rebooted Not So Good Place and find a way to, I don't known, create a real Medium Place that would probably look like Storybrooke but with lots of frozen yogurt.


End file.
